The following is a conversation with Sarah Walker,
her third time on this podcast.
She is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist
interested in the origin of life
and in discovering alien life on other worlds.
She has written an amazing new upcoming book
titled Life as No One Knows It,
The Physics of Life's Emergence.
This book is coming out on August 6th,
so please go pre-order it now.
It will blow your mind.
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And now to your friends, here's Sarah Walker.
You open the book, life as no one knows it,
the physics of life's emergence with a distinction
between the materialists and the vitalists.
So what's the difference?
Can you maybe define the two?
I think the question there is about whether life
can be described in terms of matter and physical things,
or whether there is some other feature that's not physical
that actually animates living things.
So for a long time, people maybe have called that a soul.
It's been really hard to pin down what that is.
So I think the vitalist idea is really that
it's kind of a dualistic interpretation,
that there's sort of the material properties,
but there's something else that animates life
that is there when you're alive
and it's not there when you're dead.
And materialists kind of don't think
that there's anything really special
about the matter of life and the material substrates
that life is made out of.
So they disagree on some really fundamental points.
Is there a gray area between the two?
Like maybe all there is is matter,
but there's so much we don't know
that it might as well be magic,
that like whatever that magic that the vitalists see,
meaning like there's just so much mystery
that it's really unfair to say
that it's boring and understood
and as simple as quote unquote physics.
Yeah, I think the entire universe is just a giant mystery.
I guess that's what motivates me as a scientist.
And so oftentimes when I look at open problems
like the nature of life or consciousness
or what is intelligence or are there souls
or whatever question that we have
that we feel like we aren't even on the tip of answering yet,
I think we have a lot more work to do
to really understand the answers to these questions.
So it's not magic, it's just the unknown.
And I think a lot of the history of humans coming
to understand the world around us has been taking ideas
that we once thought were magic or supernatural
and really understanding them in a much deeper way
that we learn what those things are
and they still have an air of mystery
even when we understand them.
There's no sort of bottom to our understanding.
So do you think the vitalists have a point
that they're more eager and able to notice the magic of life?
I think that no tradition, vitalists included,
is ever fully wrong about the nature
of the things that they're describing.
So a lot of times when I look at different ways
that people have described things
across human history, across different cultures,
there's always a seed of truth in them.
And I think it's really important to try to look for those
because if there are narratives
that humans have been telling ourselves
for thousands of years, for thousands of generations,
there must be some truth to them.
We've been learning about reality for a really long time.
And we recognize the patterns that reality presents us.
We don't always understand what those patterns are.
And so I think it's really important
to pay attention to that.
So I don't think the vitalists were actually wrong.
And a lot of what I talk about in the book,
but also I think about a lot just professionally
is the nature of our definitions of what's material
and how science has come to invent the concept of matter
and that some of those things actually really are
inventions that happened in a particular time,
in a particular technology
that could learn about certain patterns
and help us understand them.
And that there are some patterns we still don't understand.
And if we knew how to measure those things
or we knew how to describe them in a more rigorous way,
we would realize that the material world matter
has more properties than we thought that it did.
And one of those might be associated
with the thing that we call life.
Life could be a material property
and still have a lot of the features
that the vitalists thought were mysterious.
So we may still expand our understanding
what is incorporated in the category of matter
that will eventually incorporate such magical things
that the vitalists have noticed like life.
Yeah, so I think about,
I always like to use examples from physics.
So I'll probably do that to like,
like it's just my go-to place.
But in the history of gravitational physics,
for example, in the history of motion,
when Aristotle came up with his theories of motion,
he did it by the material properties he thought things had.
So there was a concept of things falling to earth
because they were solid-like
and things raising to the heavens
because they were air-like
and things moving around the planet
because they were celestial-like.
But then we came to realize that thousands of years later
and after the invention of many technologies
that allowed us to actually measure time
in a mechanistic way and track planetary motion,
and we could roll balls down inclined planes
and track that progress,
we realized that if we just talked about mass and acceleration,
we could unify all motion in the universe
in a really simple description.
So we didn't really have to worry about the fact
that my cup is heavy and the air is light.
Like the same laws describe them.
If we have the right material properties
to talk about what those laws are actually interacting with.
And so I think the issue with life
is we don't know how to think about information
in a material way.
And so we haven't been able to build a unified description
of what life is or the kind of things that evolution builds
because we haven't really invented
the right material concept yet.
So when talking about motion,
the laws of physics appear to be the same
everywhere out in the universe.
You think the same is true for other kinds of matter
that we might eventually include life in?
I think life obeys universal principles.
I think there is some deep underlying
explanatory framework that will tell us
about the nature of life in the universe
and will allow us to identify life
that we can't yet recognize because it's too different.
You write about the paradox of defining life.
Why does it seem to be so easy
and so complicated at the same time?
All the sort of classic definitions people want to use
just don't work.
They don't work in all cases.
So Carl Sagan had this wonderful essay
on definitions of life where I think he talks about
aliens coming from another planet.
If they saw Earth, they might think that cars
were the dominant life form
because there's so many of them on our planet
and like humans are inside them
and you might want to exclude machines,
but any definition like classic biology textbook definitions
would also include them.
And so he wanted to draw a boundary
between these kinds of things by trying to exclude them
but they were naturally included
by the definitions people want to give.
And in fact, what he ended up pointing out
is that all of the definitions of life that we have,
whether it's life is a self-reproducing system
or life eats to survive or life requires compartments,
whatever it is, there's always a counter example
that challenges that definition.
This is why viruses are so hard or why fire is so hard.
And so we've had a really hard time trying to pin down
from a definitional perspective exactly what life is.
Yeah, you actually bring up the zombie and fungus.
I enjoyed looking at this thing.
As an example of one of the challenges,
you mentioned viruses, but this is a parasite.
Look at that.
Did you see this in the jungle?
Infects, ants.
Actually, one of the interesting things about the jungle,
everything is ephemeral,
like everything eats everything really quickly.
So if an organism dies, that organism disappears.
Is it? Yeah.
It's a machine that doesn't have,
I wanted to say it doesn't have a memory or a history,
which is interesting given your work on history
in defining a living being,
the jungle forgets very quickly.
It wants to erase the fact that you existed very quickly.
Yeah, but it can't erase it.
It's just restructuring it.
And I think the other thing that is really,
vivid to me about this example that you're giving
is how much death is necessary for life.
So I worry a bit about notions of immortality
and whether immortality is a good thing or not.
So I have sort of a broad conception
that life is the only thing the universe generates
that actually has even the potential to be immortal.
But that says like the sort of process
that you're describing where life is about memory
and historical contingency
and construction of new possibilities.
But when you look at any instance of life,
especially one as dynamic as what you're describing,
it's a constant birth and death process.
But that birth and death process is like the way
that the universe can explore what possibilities can exist.
And not everything, not every possible human
or every possible ant or every possible zombie ant
or every possible tree will ever live.
So it's an incredibly dynamic and creative place
because of all that death.
So does this thing,
this is a parasite that needs the ant.
So is this a living thing or is this not a living thing?
So this is, it just pierces the ant.
I mean, it, and I've seen a lot of this, by the way,
organisms working together in the jungle,
like ants protecting a delicious piece of fruit.
So they need the fruit, but like if you touch that fruit,
they're going to, like the forces emerge.
They're fighting you, they're defending that fruit
to the death.
It's just nature seems to find mutual benefits, right?
Yeah, it does.
I think the thing that's perplexing for me
about these kinds of examples is effectively the ants dead,
but it's staying alive now
because it's piloted by this fungus.
And so that gets back to this,
thing that we were talking about a few minutes ago
about how the boundary of life is really hard to define.
So anytime that you wanna draw a boundary around something
and you say, this feature is the thing that makes this alive
or this thing is alive on its own,
there's not ever really a clear boundary.
And these kinds of examples are really good at showing that
because it's like the thing that you would have thought
is the living organism is now dead,
except that it has another living organism that's piloting it.
So the two of them together are alive in some sense,
but they're now in this kind of weird symbiotic relationship
that's taking the sand to its death.
So what do you do with that
in terms of when you try to define life?
I think we have to get rid of the notion
of an individual as being relevant.
And this is really difficult
because a lot of the ways that we think about life,
like the fundamental unit of life is the cell,
individuals are alive,
but we don't think about how gray that distinction is.
So for example, you might consider self reproduction
to be the most defining feature of life.
A lot of people do actually like,
one of these standard different definitions
that a lot of people may feel like to use in astrobiology
is life as a self sustaining chemical system
capable of Darwinian evolution,
which I was once quoted as agreeing with
and I was really offended because I hate that definition.
I think it's terrible.
And I think it's terrible that people use it.
I think like every word in that definition
is actually wrong as a descriptor of life.
Life is a self sustaining chemical system
capable of Darwinian evolution.
Why is that?
That seems like a pretty good question.
Yeah, I know.
If you wanna make me angry, you can pretend I said that.
And believed it.
So self sustaining chemical system,
Darwinian evolution, what is self sustaining?
What's so frustrating?
I mean, which aspect is frustrating to you?
But it's also those very interesting words.
Yeah, they're all interesting words.
And together they sound really smart
and they sound like they box in what life is,
but you can use any of the words individually
and you can come up with counter examples
that don't fulfill that property.
The self sustaining one is really interesting
thinking about humans, right?
Like we're not self sustaining,
we're dependent on societies.
And so I find it paradoxical that it might be that societies
because they're self sustaining units
are now more alive than individuals are.
And that could be the case,
but I still think we have some property
associated with life.
I mean, that's the thing that we're trying to describe.
So that one's quite hard.
And in general, no organism is really self sustaining.
They always require an environment.
So being self sustaining is coupled in some sense
to the world around you.
We don't live in a vacuum.
So that part's already challenging.
And then you can go to chemical system.
I don't think that's good either.
I think there's a confusion
because life emerges in chemistry, that life is chemical.
I don't think life is chemical.
I think life emerges in chemistry
because chemistry is the first thing the universe builds
where it cannot exhaust all the possibilities
because the combinatorial space of chemistry is too large.
Well, but is it possible to have a life
that is not a chemical system?
Yes.
There's a guy I know named Lee Corona
has been on a podcast a couple of times.
He just got really pissed off listening to this.
He probably just got really pissed off
hearing that for people who somehow don't know
he's a chemist.
Yeah, but he would agree with that statement.
Would he?
I don't think he would.
I don't think he would.
He would broaden the definition of chemistry
until it will include everything.
Oh, sure.
Okay, so you're-
Or maybe, I don't know.
But wait, but you said the universe,
that's the first thing it creates is chemistry.
Where the, very precisely,
it's not the first thing it creates.
Obviously, it has to make atoms first,
but it's the first thing.
If you think about the universe originated,
atoms were made in big bang nucleosynthesis
and then later in stars and then planets formed
and planets become engines of chemistry.
They start exploring what kind of chemistry is possible.
And the combinatorial space of chemistry is so large
that even on every planet in the entire universe,
you will never express every possible molecule.
I like this example, actually, that Lee gave me,
which is to think about taxol.
It has a molecular weight of about 853.
It's got a lot of atoms, but it's not astronomically large.
And if you tried to make one molecule
with that molecular formula
and every three-dimensional shape you could make
with that molecular formula,
it would fill 1.5 universes in volume.
So with one unique molecule.
That's just one molecule.
So chemical space is huge.
And I think it's really important to recognize that
because if you want to ask a question
of why does life emerge in chemistry,
well, life emerges in chemistry
because life is the physics of how the universe selects
what gets to exist.
And those things get created
along historically contingent pathways and memory
and all the other stuff that we can talk about.
But the universe has to actually make
historically contingent choices in chemistry
because it can't exhaust all possible molecules.
What kind of things can you create
that's outside the combinatorial space of chemistry?
That's what I'm trying to understand.
Oh, if it's not chemical.
So I think some of the things
that have evolved on our biosphere,
I would call as much alive as chemistry, as a cell,
but they seem much more abstract.
So for example, I think language is alive,
I think, or at least life.
I think memes are, I think.
You're saying language is life.
Yeah. Language is alive.
Oh boy, I'm gonna have to explore that one.
Okay, but. Life maybe not alive.
But I actually don't know where I stand exactly on that.
I've been thinking about that a little bit more lately.
But mathematics too.
And it's interesting because people think
that math has this platonic reality
that exists outside of our universe.
And I think it's a feature of our biosphere
and it's telling us something
about the structure of ourselves.
And I find that really interesting
because when you would sort of internalize
all of these things that we notice about the world
and you start asking, well, what does this look like
if I was something outside of myself
observing these systems that we're all embedded in,
what would that structure look like?
And I think we look really different
than the way that we talk about
what we look like to each other.
What do you think a living organism in math is?
Is it one axiomatic system
or is it individual theorems or is it?
I think it's the fact that it's open-ended in some sense.
It's another open-ended combinatorial space
and the recursive properties of it
allow creativity to happen,
which is what you see with the revolution
in the last century with Gödel's theorem and Turing.
And there's clear places where mathematics
notices holes in the universe.
So it seems like you're sneaking up
a different kind of definition of life,
open-ended large combinatorial space.
Yeah.
Room for creativity.
Definitely not chemical.
I mean, chemistry is one substrate.
Tricked to chemical.
Okay, what about the third thing,
which I think will be the hardest
because you probably like it the most,
is evolution or selection?
Well, specifically, it's Darwinian evolution.
And I think Darwinian evolution is a problem,
but the reason that that definition is a problem
is not because evolution is in the definition,
but because the implication is that,
you know, that most people would want to make
is that an individual is alive.
And the evolutionary process,
at least the Darwinian evolutionary process,
and most evolutionary processes,
they don't happen at the level of individuals,
they happen at the level of populations.
So again, you would be saying something
like what we saw with the self-sustaining definition,
which is that populations are alive,
but individuals aren't
because populations evolve and individuals don't.
And obviously, like maybe you're alive
because, you know, your gut microbiome is evolving,
but Lex is an entity right now,
is not evolving by canonical theories of evolution.
In assembly theory,
which is attempting to explain life,
evolution is a much broader thing, so.
So an individual organism can evolve
under assembly theory?
Yes, you're constructing yourself all the time.
Assembly theory is about construction
and how the universe selects for things to exist.
What if you reformulate everything,
like a population is a living organism, so.
That's fine too, but this again gets back to,
so I think what all of the, you know,
like we can nitpick at definitions.
I don't think it's like incredibly helpful to do it,
but the reason for me.
It's fun.
Yeah, it is fun, it is really fun.
And actually, I do think it's useful
in the sense that when you see the ways
that they all break down,
you either have to keep forcing in
your like sort of conception of life you want to have
or you have to say,
all these definitions are breaking down for a reason.
Maybe I should adopt a more expansive definition
that encompasses all the things that I think are life.
And so for me, I think life is the process
of how information structures matter over time and space.
And an example of life is what emerges on a planet
and yields an open-ended cascade
of generation of structure and increasing complexity.
And this is the thing that life is.
And any individual is just a particular instance
of these lineages that are, you know,
structured across time.
And so we focus so much on these individuals
that are these short temporal moments
in this larger causal structure
that actually is the life on our planet.
And I think that's why these definitions break down
because they're not general enough,
they're not universal enough, they're not deep enough,
they're not abstract enough
to actually capture that regularity.
Because we're focused on those,
that little ephemeral thing that we call the human life.
Aristotle focusing on, you know, heavy things falling
because they're earth-like and, you know,
things floating because they're air-like,
it's the wrong thing to focus on.
So what exactly are we missing
by focusing on such a short span of time?
I think we're missing most of what we are.
So one of the issues,
I've been thinking about this really viscerally lately,
it's weird when you do theoretical physics
because I think it like literally changes
the structure of your brain
and you see the world differently,
especially when you're trying to build new abstractions.
Do you think it's possible if you're a theoretical physicist
like it's easy to fall off the cliff
and go descend into madness?
I mean, I think you're always on the edge of it,
but I think what is amazing about being a scientist
and trying to do things rigorously
is it keeps your sanity.
So I think if I wasn't a theoretical physicist,
I would be probably not sane.
But what it forces you to do is hold the,
like you have to hold yourself to the fire of like,
these abstractions in my mind
have to really correspond to reality.
And I have to really test that all the time.
And so I love building new abstractions
and I love going to those like incredibly creative,
you know, spaces that people don't see
as part of the way that we understand the world now.
But ultimately I have to make sure
that whatever I'm pulling from that space
is something that's really usable
and really like relates to the world outside of me.
That's what science is.
So we were talking about what we're missing
when we look at a small stretch of time
and a small stretch of space.
Yeah, so the issue is we evolve perception
to see reality a certain way, right?
So for us, space is really important
and time feels fleeting.
And I, you know, I had a really wonderful mentor,
Paul Davies, most of my career,
and Paul's amazing because he gives these like
little seed thought experiments all the time.
Like, you know, something he used to ask me all the time
was when I was a postdoc,
this is kind of a random tangent,
but was like, you know,
how much of the universe could be converted into technology
if you were thinking about like, you know,
long-term futures and stuff like that.
And it's like a weird thought experiment,
but like there's a lot of deep things there.
And I do think a lot about the fact that
we're really limited in our interactions with reality
by the particular architectures that we evolved.
And so we're not seeing everything.
And in fact, our technology tells us this all the time
because it allows us to see the world in new ways
by basically allowing us to perceive the world
in ways that we couldn't otherwise.
And so what I'm getting at with this is
I think that living objects are actually huge.
Like there are some of the biggest structures
in the universe, but they are not big in space.
They are big in time.
And we actually can't resolve that feature.
We don't interact with it on a regular basis.
So we see them as these fleeting things
that have this really short temporal clock time
without seeing how large they are.
When I'm saying time here, I really,
like the way that people could picture it
is in terms of causal structure.
So if you think about the history of the universe
to get to you, and you imagine
that that entire history is you,
that is the picture I have in my mind
when I look at every living thing.
So you have a tweet for everything.
You tweet it.
Doesn't everyone?
You have a lot of poetic, profound tweets.
Sometimes they're puzzles
that take a long time to figure out.
Well, you know what the trick is?
The reason they're hard to write
is because it's compressing a very deep idea
into a short amount of space.
And I really like doing that intellectual exercise
because I find it productive for me.
Yeah, it's a very interesting
kind of compression algorithm though.
Yeah, I like language.
I think it's really fun to play with.
Yeah, I wonder if AI can decompress it.
That'd be interesting.
I would like to try this,
but I think I use language in certain ways
that are non-canonical, and I do it very purposefully.
And it would be interesting to me
how AI would interpret it.
Yeah, your tweets would be a good touring test
for superintelligence.
Anyway, you tweeted that things only look emergent
because we can't see time.
So if we could see time, what would the world look like?
You're saying you'll be able to see
everything that an object has been,
every step of the way that led to this current moment
and all the interactions
that required to make that evolution happen.
So you would see this gigantic tail.
The universe is far larger in time than it is in space.
Yeah.
And this planet is one of the biggest things in the universe.
Also, the more complexity, the bigger the object is.
Yeah, technosphere.
I think the modern technosphere is the largest object
in time in the universe that we know about.
And when you say technosphere, what do you mean?
I mean the global integration
of life and technology on this planet.
So all the technological things were created?
But I don't think of them as separate.
They're like very integrated
with the structure that generated them.
So you can almost imagine it,
like time is constantly bifurcating
and it's generating new structures.
And these new structures
are locally constructing the future.
And so things like you and I
are very close together in time
because we didn't diverge like very early
in the history universe, it's very recent.
And I think this is one of the reasons
that we can understand each other so well
and we can communicate effectively.
And I might have some sense
of what it feels like to be you.
But other organisms bifurcated from us in time earlier,
this is just the concept of phylogeny, right?
But if you take that deeper
and you really think about that as the structure
of the physics that generates life
and you take that very seriously,
all of that causation is still bundled up
in the objects we observe today.
And so you and I are close in this temporal structure
but we're so close because we're really big
and we only are very different
and sort of like the most recent moments
in the time that's like embedded in us.
It's hard to use words to visualize what's in minds.
I have such a hard time with this sometimes.
I actually was thinking in the way over here,
I was like, you have pictures in your brain
and then they're hard to put into words.
But I realized I always say I have a visual
but it's not actually I have a visual,
it's I have a feeling.
Because oftentimes I cannot actually draw a picture
in my mind for the things that I say
but sometimes they go through a picture
before they get to words.
But I like experimenting with words
because I think they help paint pictures.
Yeah, it's again some kind of compressed feeling
that you can query to get a sense
of the bigger visualization that you have in mind.
It's just a really nice compression.
But I think the idea of this object
that in it contains all the information
about the history of an entity that you see now,
just trying to visualize that is pretty cool.
I mean obviously the mind breaks down quickly
as you step seconds and minutes back in time.
For sure.
I guess it's just a gigantic object
that's supposed to be thinking about.
Yeah, I think so.
And I think this is one of the reasons
that we have such an ability to abstract as humans
because we are so gigantic
that the space that we can go back into is really large.
So the more abstract you're going,
the deeper you're going in that space.
But in that sense aren't we fundamentally all connected?
Yes, and this is why the definition of life
cannot be the individual, it has to be these lineages
because they're all connected, they're interwoven
and they're exchanging parts all the time.
Yeah, so maybe there's certain aspects of those lineages
that can be lifelike, they can be characteristics,
they can be measured like with the somebody's theory
that has more or less life.
But they're all just fingertips of a much bigger object.
Yeah, I think life is very high dimensional.
And in fact I think you can be alive in some dimensions
and not in others.
Like if you could project all the causation that's in you
in some features of you,
very little causation is required
and like very little history and in some features a lot is.
So it's quite difficult to take this really high dimensional
very deep structure and project it into things
that we really can understand and say like,
this is the one thing that we're seeing
because it's not one thing.
It's funny we're talking about this now
and I'm slowly starting to realize
one of the things I saw when I took Ayahuasca
afterwards actually, so the actual ceremony
is four or five hours, but afterwards you're still riding
whatever the thing that you're riding.
And I got a chance to afterwards hang out with some friends
and just shoot the shit in the forest.
And I get to see their faces.
And what was happening with their faces and their hair
is I would get this interesting effect.
First of all, everything was beautiful
and I just had so much love for everybody.
But I could see their past selves like behind them.
It was this effect where I guess it's a blurring effect
of where like if I move like this,
the faces that weren't just there are still there
and it would just float like this,
these behind them which will create this incredible effect.
But it's also another way to think about that
is I'm visualizing a little bit of that object
of the thing they wore just a few seconds ago.
It's a cool little effect.
That's very cool.
And now it's like giving it a bit more profundity
to the effect that was just beautiful aesthetically,
but it's also beautiful from a physics perspective
because that is a past self.
I get a little glimpse at the past selves that they wore,
but then you take that to its natural conclusion,
not just a few seconds ago,
but just to the beginning of the universe.
And you can probably get to that,
get down that lineage.
It's crazy that there's billions of years inside all of us.
All of us.
And then we connect obviously.
Not too long ago.
You mentioned just the technosphere
and you also wrote that the most alive thing
on this planet is our technosphere.
Why is the technology we create a kind of life form?
Why are you seeing it as life?
Because it's creative, but with us obviously,
not independently of us.
And also because of this sort of lineage view of life.
And I think about life often
as a planetary scale phenomena,
because that's sort of the natural boundary
for all of this causation that's bundled
in every object in our biosphere.
And so for me, it's just sort of the current boundary
of how far life on our planet has pushed
into the things that our universe can generate.
And so it's the furthest thing.
It's the biggest thing.
And I think a lot about the nature of life
across different scales.
And so we have cells inside of us that are alive
and we feel like we're alive,
but we don't often think about the societies
that we're embedded in as alive or a global scale organization
of us and our technology on the planet as alive.
But I think if you have this deeper view
into the nature of life, which I think is necessary also
to solve the origin of life,
then you have to include those things.
All of them, you have to simultaneously think about life
at every single scale, the planetary
and the bacteria level.
This is the hard thing about solving the problem of life.
I think is how many things you have to integrate
into building a sort of a unified picture
of this thing that we want to call life.
And a lot of our theories of physics are built
on building deep regularities that explain
a really broad class of phenomenon.
And I think we haven't really traditionally thought
about life that way.
But I think to get at some of these hardest questions
like looking for life on other planets or the origin
of life, you really have to think about it that way.
And so most of my professional work is just trying
to understand every single thing on this planet
that might be an example of life,
which is pretty much everything and then trying to figure
out what's the deeper structure underlying that.
Yeah, Schrodinger wrote that living matter
while not alluding the laws of physics is established
up to date is likely to involve other laws of physics
heather to unknown.
So to him,
I love that quote.
There was a sense that at the bottom of this
are new laws of physics that could explain
this thing that we call life.
Yeah, Schrodinger really tried to do what physicists
try to do, which is explain things.
And his attempt was to try to explain life
in terms of non-equilibrium physics,
because he thought that was the best description
that we could generate at the time.
And so he did come up with something really insightful,
which was to predict the structure of DNA
as an aperiodic crystal.
And that was for a very precise reason that was the only
kind of physical structure that could encode enough
information to actually specify a cell.
We knew some things about genes, but not about DNA
and its actual structure when he proposed that.
But in the book, he tried to explain life
as kind of going against entropy.
And so some people have talked about it as like
Schrodinger's paradox, how can life persist
when the second law of thermodynamics is there?
But in open systems, that's not so problematic.
And really the question is why can life generate
so much order?
And we don't have a physics to describe that.
And it's interesting, generations of physicists
have thought about this problem.
Oftentimes it's like when people are retiring,
they're like, oh, now I can work on life.
Or they're like more senior in their career
and they've worked on other more traditional problems.
And there's still a lot of impetus in the physics community
to think that non-equilibrium physics will explain life.
But I think that's not the right approach.
I don't think ultimately the solution to what life is
is there and I don't really think entropy has much to do
with it unless it's entirely reformulated.
Well, because you have to explain how interesting order,
how complex it emerges from the soup.
Yes, from randomness.
From randomness.
Physics currently can't do that.
No, physics hardly even acknowledges
that the universe is random at its base.
We like to think we live in a deterministic universe
and everything's deterministic.
But I think that's probably an artifact
of the way that we've written down laws of physics
since Newton invented modern physics
and his conception of motion and gravity,
which he formulated laws that had initial conditions
and fixed dynamical laws.
And that's been sort of become the standard canon
of how people think the universe works
and how we need to describe any physical system
is with an initial condition and a law of motion.
And I think that's not actually
the way the universe really works.
I think it's a good approximation for the kind of systems
that physicists have studied so far.
And I think it will radically fail in the long-term
at describing reality at its more basal levels.
I'm not saying there's a base.
I don't think that reality has a ground.
And I don't think there's a theory of everything,
but I think there are better theories
and I think there are more explanatory theories.
And I think we can get to something that explains
much more than the current laws of physics do.
When you say theory of everything,
you mean like everything, everything.
Yeah, you know, like in physics right now,
it's really popular to talk about theories of everything.
So string theory is supposed to be a theory of everything
because it unifies quantum mechanics and gravity.
And people have their different pet theories of everything.
And the challenge with a theory of everything,
I really love this quote from David Krakauer,
which is a theory of everything is a theory of everything
except those things that theorize.
Oh, you mean removing the observer from the thing.
Yeah, but it's also weird
because if a theory of everything explained everything,
it should also explain the theory.
So the theory has to be recursive.
And none of our theories of physics are recursive.
So it's a weird concept.
Yeah, but it's very difficult to integrate the observer
into a theory.
I don't think so.
I think you can build a theory acknowledging
that you're an observer inside the universe.
But doesn't it become recursive in that way?
And you think it's possible to make a theory
that's okay with that?
I think so.
I mean, I don't think,
there's always gonna be the paradox of another meta level.
You could build on the meta level, right?
So like if you assume this is your universe
and you're the observer outside of it,
you have some meta description of that universe,
but then you need a meta description
of you describing that universe, right?
So this is one of the biggest challenges
that we face being observers inside our universe.
And also why the paradox is
in the foundations of mathematics
and any place that we try to have observers in the system
or a system describing itself show up.
But I think it is possible to build a physics
that builds in those things intrinsically
without having them be paradoxical
or have holes in the descriptions.
And so one place I think about this quite a lot,
which I think can give you sort of a more concrete example
is the nature of like what we call fundamental.
So we typically define fundamental right now
in terms of the smallest indivisible units of matter.
So again, you have to have a definition
of what you think material is and matter is,
but right now what's fundamental or elementary particles.
And we think they're fundamental
because we can't break them apart further.
And obviously we have theories like string theory
that if they're right,
would replace the current description
of what's the most fundamental thing in our universe
by replacing it with something smaller.
But we can't get to those theories
because we're technologically limited.
And so if you look at this from a historical perspective
and you think about explanations changing
as physical systems like us
learn more about the reality in which they live,
we once considered atoms to be the most fundamental thing.
And it literally comes from the word indivisible.
And then we realized atoms had substructure
because we built better technology,
which allowed us to quote unquote see the world better
and resolve smaller features of it.
And then we built even better technology,
which allowed us to see even smaller structure
and get down to the standard model particles.
And we think that there might be structure below that,
but we can't get there yet with our technology.
So what's fundamental,
the way we talk about it in current physics
is not actually fundamental.
It's the boundaries of what we can observe in our universe,
what we can see with our technology.
And so if you wanna build a theory that's about us
and about what's inside the universe that we can observe,
not what's at the boundary of it,
you need to talk about objects that are in the universe
that you can actually break apart to smaller things.
So I think the things that are fundamental
are actually the constructed objects.
They're the ones that really exist
and you really understand their properties
because you know how the universe constructed them
because you can actually take them apart.
You can understand the intrinsic laws that built them.
But the things that the boundary are just at the boundary,
they're evolving with us
and we'll learn more about that structure as we go along.
But really, if we wanna talk about
what's fundamental inside our universe,
we have to talk about all these things
that are traditionally considered emergent,
but really just structures in time
that have causal histories that constructed them
and are really actually what our universe is about.
So we should focus on the construction methodology
as the fundamental thing.
But do you think there's a bottom
to the smallest possible thing
that makes up the universe?
I don't see one.
And it'll take way too long.
It'll take longer to find that
than it will to understand the mechanism that created life.
I think so, yeah.
I think for me, the frontier in modern physics,
where the new physics lies
is not in high energy particle physics.
It's not in quantum gravity.
It's not in any of these sort of traditionally sold.
This is gonna be the newest deepest insight
we have into the nature of reality.
It is going to be in studying the problems of life
and intelligence and the things that are sort of
also our current existential crises as a civilization
or a culture that's going through an existential trauma
of inventing technologies that we don't understand right now.
The existential trauma and the terror we feel
that that technology might somehow destroy us,
meaning living intelligently with organisms.
Yet we don't understand what that even means.
Well, humans have always been afraid
of our technologies though, right?
So it's kind of a fascinating thing
that every time we invent something,
we don't understand.
It takes us a little while to catch up with it.
I think also in part humans kind of love being afraid.
Yeah, we love being traumatized.
It's weird.
We wanna learn more.
And then when we learn more, it traumatizes us.
You know, I never thought about it this before,
but I think this is one of the reasons I love what I do
is because it traumatizes me all the time.
That sounds really bad.
But what I mean is like, I love the shock of like realizing
that like coming to understand something in a way
that you never understood it before.
I think it seems to me when I see a lot of the ways
other people react to new ideas
that they don't feel that way intrinsically.
But for me, that's like, that's why I do what I do.
I love that feeling.
But you're also working on a topic
where it's fundamentally ego destroying
because you're talking about like life.
It's humbling to think that we're not,
the individual human is not special.
Yeah.
And you're like very viscerally exploring that.
Yeah, I'm trying to embody that
because I think you have to live the physics
to understand it, but there's a great quote about Einstein.
I don't know if this is true or not
that he once said that he could feel like
the beam in his belly.
And I think,
but I think like, you gotta think about it though, right?
Like you're, if you're a really deep thinker
and you're really thinking about reality that deeply
and you are part of the reality
that you're trying to describe, like you feel it.
You really feel it.
That's what I was saying about,
you're always like walking along the cliff.
If you fall off, you're falling into madness.
Yes, it's a constant, constant descent into madness.
The fascinating thing about physicists and madness
is that you don't know if you've fallen off the cliff.
Yeah, you know, you don't know.
That's the cool thing about that.
I rely on other people to tell me.
Actually, this is very funny
because like I have these conversations with my students
often, like they're worried about going crazy.
And I have to like reassure them
that like one of the reasons they'll stay sane
is by trying to work on concrete problems.
Going crazy or waking up, I don't know which one it is.
Yeah.
So what do you think is the origin of life on earth?
And how can we talk about it in a productive way?
The origin of life is like this boundary
that the universe can only cross
if a structure that emerges can reinforce its own existence,
which is self reproduction, autocatalysis,
things people traditionally talk about.
But it has to be able to maintain its own existence
against this sort of randomness that happens in chemistry
and this randomness that happens in the quantum world.
And like, it's in some sense,
the emergence of like a deterministic structure that says,
you know, I'm gonna exist and I'm gonna keep going.
But, you know, pinning that down is really hard.
We have ways of thinking about it in assembly theory
that I think are pretty rigorous.
And one of the things I'm really excited about
is trying to actually quantify
in an assembly theoretic way when the origin of life happens.
But the basic process I have in mind
is like a system that has no causal contingency,
no constraints of objects,
basically constraining the existence of other objects
or forming or allowing the existence of other objects.
And so that sounds very abstract,
but like you can just think of like a chemical reaction
can't happen if there's not a catalyst, for example,
or a baby can't be born if there wasn't a parent.
So there's a lot of causal contingency
that's necessary for certain things to happen.
So you think about the sort of unconstrained random system,
there's nothing that reinforces
the existence of other things.
So the sort of resources just get washed out
in all of these different structures
and none of them exist again,
or they're not very complicated
if they're in high abundance.
And some random events allow some things
to start reinforcing the existence
of a small subset of objects.
And if they can do that,
like just molecules basically recognizing each other
and being able to catalyze certain reactions,
there's this kind of transition point that happens
where unless you get a self-reinforcing structure,
something that can maintain its own existence,
it actually can't cross this boundary
to make any objects in high abundance
without having this sort of past history
that it's carrying with us
and maintaining the existence of that past history.
And that boundary point where objects can't exist
unless they have the selection in history in them
is what we call the original life.
And pretty much everything beyond that boundary
is holding on for dear life
to all of the causation and causal structure
that's basically put it there.
And it's carving its way through this possibility space
into generating more and more structure.
And that's when you get the open-ended cascade of evolution.
But that boundary point is really hard to cross.
And then what happens when you cross that boundary point
and the way objects come into existence
is also like really fascinating dynamics
because as things become more complex,
the assembly index increases.
I can explain all these things.
Sorry, you can tell me what you want to explain.
I mean, explain or what people will want to hear.
Sorry, I have like a very vivid visual on my brain
and it's really hard to articulate it.
Got to convert it to language.
I know, so hard.
It's going from like a feeling to a visual to language
is so stifling sometimes.
I have to convert it from language to a visual to a feeling.
Yeah.
I think it's working.
I hope so.
I really like the self-reinforcing of objects.
I mean, just so I understand,
one way to create a lot of the same kind of object
is make them self-reinforcing.
Yes.
So self-reproduction has its property, right?
Like if a system can make itself,
then it can persist in time, right?
Because all objects decay, they all have a finite lifetime.
So if you're able to make a copy of yourself
before you die, before the second law eats you
or whatever people think happens,
then that structure can persist in time.
So that's a way to sort of emerge out of a random soup,
out of the randomness of soup.
Right, but things that can copy themselves are very rare.
Yeah, rare.
And so what ends up happening is that you get structures
that enable the existence of other things.
And then somehow, only for some sets of objects,
you get closed structures that are self-reinforcing
and allow that entire structure to persist.
Right, so the one, object A reinforces the existence
of object B, but object A can die.
Yeah.
So you have to close that loop.
Right, so this is the classic idea.
It's all very unlikely statistically,
but that's sufficiently,
so you're saying there's a chance.
There is a chance.
There's a probability, but once you solve that,
once you close the loop,
you can create a lot of those objects.
And that's what we're trying to figure out
is what are the causal constraints that close the loop.
So there is this idea that's been in the literature
for a really long time that was originally proposed
by Stuart Kaufman as really critical to the origin life
called autocatalytic set.
So autocatalytic set is exactly this property.
We have A makes B, B makes C, C makes A,
and you get a closed system.
But the problem with the theory of autocatalytic sets
is incredibly brittle as a theory,
and it requires a lot of ad hoc assumptions.
Like you have to assume function.
You have to say this thing makes B.
It's not an emergent property,
the association between A and B.
And so the way I think about it is much more general.
If you think about these histories that make objects,
it's kind of like the structure of the histories
becomes collapses in such a way
that these things are all in the same sort
of causal structure,
and that causal structure actually loops back on itself
to be able to generate some of the things
that make the higher level structures.
Leah has a beautiful example of this actually in molybdenum.
It's like the first non-organic autocatalytic set.
It's a self-reproducing molybdenum ring.
But it's like molybdenum,
and basically if you look at the molybdenum,
it makes a huge molybdenum ring.
I don't remember exactly how big it is.
It might be like 150 molybdenum atoms or something.
But if you think about the configuration space
of that object, it's exponentially large,
how many possible molecules?
So why does the entire system collapse
on just making that one structure?
If you start from molybdenum atoms
that are maybe just a couple of them stuck together.
And so what they see in this system
is there's a few intermediate stages.
So there's some random events
where the chemistry comes together,
makes these structures.
And then once you get to this very large one,
it becomes a template for the smaller ones,
and then the whole system
just reinforces its own production.
How did Lee find this molybdenum?
If I knew how Lee's brain worked,
I think I would understand a little more
about the universe.
But I-
This is not an algorithmic discovery.
It's a-
No, but I think it goes to the deepest roots
of when he started thinking about origins of life.
So I mean, I don't know all his history,
but what he's told me is he started out in crystallography.
And there's some things that he would just,
people would just take for granted
about chemical structures
that he was deeply perplexed about.
Just like, why are these really intricate,
really complex structures forming
so easily under these conditions?
And he was really interested in life,
but he started in that field.
So he's just carried with him
these sort of deep insights from these systems
that seem like they're totally not alive,
and just like these metallic chemistries
into actually thinking about the deep principles of life.
So I think he already knew a lot about that chemistry,
and he also, assembly theory came from him
thinking about how these systems work.
So he had some intuition about what was going on
with this molybdenum ring.
The molybdenum might be able to be the thing
that makes a ring.
They knew about them for a long time,
but they didn't know that the mechanism
of why that particular structure formed
was autocatolic feedback.
And so that's what they figured out in this paper.
And I actually think that paper is revealing
some of the mechanism of the origin of life transition,
because really what you see,
like the origin of life is basically like,
you should have a combinatorial explosion
of the space of possible structures
that are too large to exhaust,
and yet you see it collapse on this,
you know, really small space of possibilities
that's mutually reinforcing itself to keep existing.
That is the origin of life.
There's some set of structures
that result in this autocatolic feedback.
Yeah.
And is it, what is it?
Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny percent?
I think it's a small space, but chemistry is very large.
So there might be a lot of them out there,
but we don't know.
And one of them is the thing
that probably started life on Earth.
That's right.
Or many, many starts.
Yes.
And they keep starting maybe.
I mean, there's also all kinds of other weird properties
that happen around this kind of phase boundary.
So this other project that I have in my lab
is focused on the origin of chirality,
which is, you know, thinking about,
so chirality is this property of molecules
that they can come in mirror image forms.
So like chiral living means hand.
So your left and right hand
are what's called non-superimposable
because if you try to lay one on the other,
you can't actually lay them directly on top of each other.
And that's the property of being a mirror image.
So there's this sort of perplexing property
of the chemistry of life
that no one's been able to really adequately explain
that all of the amino acids in proteins are left-handed
and all of the bases in RNA and DNA are right-handed.
And yet the chemistry of these building block units,
the amino acids and nucleobases
is the same for left and right-handed.
So you have to have like some kind of symmetry breaking
where you go from these chemistries
that seem entirely equivalent
to only having one chemistry takeover as the dominant form.
And for a long time, I had been really,
I actually did my PhD on the origin of chirality.
I was working on it as like a symmetry breaking problem
in physics.
This is how I got started in the origin of life.
And then I left it for a long time
because I thought it was like one of the most boring problems
in the origin of life, but I've come back to it
because I think there's something really deep going on here
related to this like combinatorial explosion
of the space of possibilities.
But just to get to that point,
like this feature of this handedness
has been the main focus,
but people take for granted the existence
of chiral molecules at all,
that this property of having a handedness
and they just assume that like,
it's just a generic feature of chemistry.
But if you actually look at molecules,
if you look at chemical space,
which is like the space of all possible molecules
that people can generate,
and you look at small molecules,
things that have less than about seven to 11 heavy atoms,
so things that are not hydrogen,
almost every single molecule in that space is achiral,
like doesn't have a chiral center.
So it would be like a spoon,
a spoon doesn't have it,
like it's the same as its mirror image,
it's not like a hand that's different than its mirror image.
But if you get to like this threshold boundary,
above that boundary,
almost every single molecule is chiral.
So you go from a universe
where almost nothing has a mirror image form,
there's no mirror image universe of possibilities
to this one where every single structure
has pretty much a mirror image version.
And what we've been looking at in my lab
is that it seems to be the case
that the origin of life transition
happens around the time when you start accumulating,
you push your molecules to a large enough complexity
that chiral molecules become very likely to form.
And then there's a cascade of molecular recognition
where chiral molecules can recognize each other.
And then you get this sort of autocatalytic feedback
and things self reinforcing.
So is chirality in itself an interesting feature
or just an accident of complexity?
No, it's a super interesting feature.
I think chirality breaks symmetry in time, not space.
So we think of it as a spatial property,
like a left and right hand.
But if I choose the left hand,
I'm basically choosing the future of that system
for all time because I've basically made a choice
between the ways that that molecule can now react
with every other object in its chemical universe.
Oh, I see.
And so you're actually like when you have this splitting
of making a molecule that now has another form
it could have had by the same exact atomic composition,
but now it's just a mirror image isometry.
You're basically splitting the universe
of possibilities every time.
Yeah, in two.
In two, but molecules can have more than one chiral center
and that's not the only stereosammetry that they can have.
So this is one of the reasons that Taxol fills
1.5 universes of space.
It's all of these spatial permutations that you do
on these objects that actually makes the space so huge.
So the point of this sort of chiral transition
that I'm putting out is chirality is actually signature
of being in a complex chemical space.
And the fact that we think it's a really generic feature
of chemistry and it's really prevalent is because
most of the chemistry we study on earth
is a product already of life.
And it also has to do with this transition in assembly,
this transition in possibility spaces,
because I think there's something really fundamental
going on at this boundary that you don't really need
to go that far into chemical space.
If you can, to actually see life in terms of this depth
in time, this depth in symmetries of objects
in terms of like chiral symmetries
or this assembly structure,
but getting past this boundary that's not very deep
in that space requires life.
It's a really weird property.
And it's really weird that so many abrupt things happen
in chemistry at that same scale.
So would that be the greatest invention ever made on earth
in its evolutionary history?
So I really liked that formulation of it.
Nick Lane has a book called Life Ascending,
where he lists the 10 great inventions of evolution,
the origin of life being first,
and DNA, the hereditary material
that encodes the genetic instructions
for all living organisms, then photosynthesis,
the process that allows organisms to convert sunlight
into chemical energy, producing oxygen as a by-product,
the complex cell, eukaryotic cells,
which contain a nucleus and organelles
that rose from simple bacterial cells,
sex, sexual reproduction, movement,
so just the ability to move under which you have
the predation, the predators and ability of living organisms.
Oh, I like that movement's in there, that's cool.
Yeah, but movement includes a lot of interesting stuff
in there, like predator-prey dynamic,
which, not to romanticize nature as metal,
that seems like an important one.
I don't know, it's such a computationally powerful thing
to have a predator and prey.
Well, it's efficient for things to eat other things
that are already alive,
because they don't have to go all the way back
to the base chemistry.
Well, that, but maybe I just like deadlines,
but it creates an urgency, it's gonna get eaten.
You gotta live?
Yeah, survival, it's not just the static environment
you're betting against, you're like...
Yeah.
The dangers against which you're trying to survive
are also evolving, this is just a much faster way
to explore the space of possibilities.
I actually think it's a gift that we don't have much time.
Yes, sight, the ability to see,
so the increasing complexifying of sensory organisms,
consciousness and death,
the concept of programmed cell death,
these are all inventions along the line.
I like invention as a word for them, I think that's good.
Which are the more interesting inventions to you?
What origin of life,
because you kind of are not glorifying
the origin of life itself.
There's a process.
No, I think the origin of life is a continual process,
that's why.
I'm interested in the first transition
and solving that problem,
because I think it's the hardest,
but I think it's happening all the time.
When you look back at the history of Earth,
what are you impressed happened?
I like sight as an invention,
because I think having sensory perception
and trying to comprehend the world,
to use anthropocentric terms,
is like a really critical feature of life.
And I also, it's interesting the way that sight
has complexified over time, right?
So like if you think at the origin of life,
nothing on the planet could see, right?
So like for a long time, life had no sight.
And then like photon receptors were invented.
And then when multicellularity evolved,
those cells eventually grew into eyes.
And we had the multicellular eye.
And then it's interesting when you get to societies,
like human societies,
that we invent even better technologies
of seeing like telescopes and microscopes,
which allow us to see deeper into the universe
or at smaller scales.
So I think that's pretty profound,
the way that sight has transformed the ability of life
to literally see the reality in which it's existing in.
I think consciousness is also obviously deeply interesting.
I've gotten kind of obsessed with like octopus.
They're just so weird.
And the fact that like they evolved complex nervous systems
kind of independently seems very alien.
Yeah, there's a lot of alien like organisms.
That's another thing I saw in the jungle.
Yeah.
Just things that are like,
oh, okay, they make one of those, huh?
It just feels like there's-
Do you have any examples?
There's a frog that's as thin as a sheet of paper.
And I was like, what?
And it gets birthed through like pores.
Like how-
Oh, I've seen videos of that.
It's so gross when the babies come out.
Did you see that?
Yes.
Like in person?
Like the babies coming out?
Oh no, no.
I saw the, without the-
Have you seen videos of that?
It's so gross.
It's one of the grossest things I've ever seen.
Well, gross is just the other side of beautiful.
Yeah.
It's like, oh wow, that's possible.
I guess if I was one of those frogs,
I would think that was the most beautiful event
I'd ever seen.
Although like human childbirth
is not that beautiful either.
Yeah, it's all out of perspective.
Well, we come into the world so violently.
It's just like, it's amazing.
I mean, the world is a violent place.
So again, another, it's just another side of the coin.
This actually makes me think of one that's not up there,
which I do find really incredibly amazing
is the process of like the germline cell in organisms.
Like basically like every living thing on this planet
at some point in its life has to go through a single cell.
And this whole issue of like development,
like the developmental program is kind of crazy.
Like how do you build you out of a single cell?
How does a single cell know how to do that?
Like pattern formation of a multicellular organism
obviously like evolves with DNA,
but there's a lot of stuff happening there
about when cells take on certain morphologies
and things that people don't understand
like the actual shape formation mechanism.
And a lot of people study that
and there's a lot of advances being made now in that field.
I think it's pretty shocking though
that like how little we know about that process.
And often it's left off of people's lists.
It's just kind of interesting.
My rheogenesis is fascinating.
Yeah, because you start from just one cell.
Yeah, and the genes in all the cells are the same, right?
So like the differentiation has to be something
that's like much more about like the actual like,
you know, expression of genes over time
and like how they get switched on and off
and also the physical environment
of like the cell interacting with other cells.
And there's just a lot of stuff going on.
Yeah, the computation, the intelligence of that process
might be like the most important thing to understand.
And we just kind of don't really think about it.
We think about the final product.
Yeah.
Maybe the key to understanding the organism
is understanding that process, not the final product.
Probably, yes.
I think most of the things about understanding anything
about what we are embedded in time.
Well, of course you would say that.
I know, so predictable.
It's turning into a deterministic universe.
It always has been, always was like the meme.
Yeah, always was, but it won't be in the future.
Well, that's, before we talk about the future,
let's talk about the past, the assembly theory.
Can you explain assembly theory to me?
I listened to Lee talk about it for many hours
and I understood nothing.
No, I'm just kidding.
I just wanted to take another,
you've been already talking about it,
but just, just another, just,
what from a big picture view is the assembly theory way
of thinking about our world, about our universe?
I think the first thing is that like the observation
that life seems to be the only thing in the universe
that builds complexity and the way that we see it here
and complexity is obviously like a loaded term.
So I'll just use assembly instead
because I think assembly is more precise.
But the idea that like all the things on your desk here
from your computer to the pen to us sitting here
don't exist anywhere else in the universe
as far as we know, they only exist on this planet.
And it took a long evolutionary history to get to us.
Is a real feature that we should take seriously
as one that's deeply embedded
in the laws of physics and the structure of the universe
that we live in.
Standard physics would say that,
all of that complexity traces back
to the infinitesimal deviations
and like the initial state of the universe
that there was some order there.
I find that deeply unsatisfactory
and what assembly theory says that's very different
is that the universe is basically constructing itself.
And when you get to these combinatorial spaces
like chemistry, where the space of possibilities
is too large to exhaust them all,
you can only construct things
along historically contingent paths.
Like you basically have causal chains of events
that happen to allow other things to come into existence.
And that this is the way that complex objects get formed
is basically on scaffolding on the past history
of objects making more complex objects,
making more complex objects.
That idea in itself is easy to state and simple,
but it has some really radical implications
as far as what you think is the nature
of the physics that would describe life.
And so what assembly theory does formally
is try to measure the boundary
in the space of all things that chemically could exist,
for example, like all possible molecules.
Where is the boundary above which we should say
these things are too complex to happen
outside of an evolutionary chain of events,
outside of selection.
And we formalize that with two observables.
One of them is the copy number of the object.
So how many of the object did you observe?
And the second one is what's the minimal number
of recursive steps to make it.
So if you start from elementary building blocks
like bonds for molecules and you put them together
and then you take things you've made already
and build up to the object,
what's the shortest number of steps you had to take?
And what Lee's been able to show in the lab with his team
is that for organic chemistry, it's about 15 steps.
And then you only see molecules that,
you know, the only molecules that we observe
that are past that threshold are ones that are in life.
And in fact, one of the things I'm trying to do
with this idea of like trying to actually quantify
the origin of life as a transition
and like a phase transition and assembly theory
is actually be able to explain why that boundary
is where it is.
Cause I think that's actually the boundary
that life must cross.
So the idea of going back to this thing
we were talking about before about these structures
that can reinforce their own existence
and move past that boundary,
15 seems to be that boundary in chemical space.
It's not a universal number.
It will be different for different assembly spaces.
But that's what we've experimentally validated so far.
And then-
So literally 15, like the assembly index is 15.
It's 15 or so for the experimental data, yeah.
So that's when you start getting the self-reinforcing.
That's when you have to have that feature
in order to observe molecules in high abundance
in that space.
So the copy number is the number of exact copies.
That's what you mean by high abundance
and assembly index or the complexity of the object is
how many steps it took to create it, recursive.
Recursive, yeah.
So you can think of objects in assembly theory
as basically recursive stacks
of the construction steps to build them.
So they're like, it's like, you take this step
and then you make this object
and you make it this object and make this object
and then you get up to the final object.
But that object is all of that history rolled up
into the current structure.
What if you took the long way home?
You can't take the long way.
Why not?
The long way doesn't exist.
That's a good song though.
What do you mean the long way doesn't exist?
If I do a random walk from A to B,
I'll eventually, if I start at A,
I'll eventually end up at B
and that random walk would be much shorter
than the longer than the shorter.
If you look at objects and you,
so we define something we call the assembly universe
and the assembly universe is ordered in time.
It's actually ordered in the causation,
the number of steps to produce an object.
And so all objects in the universe
are in some sense existed a layer
that's defined by their assembly index.
And the size of each layer is growing exponentially.
So what you're talking about
if you wanna look at the long way of getting to an object,
as I'm increasing the assembly index of an object,
I'm moving deeper and deeper
into an exponentially growing space.
And it's actually also the case
that the sort of typical path to get to that object
is also exponentially growing
with respect to the assembly index.
And so if you want to try to make
a more and more complex object
and you wanna do it by a typical path,
that's actually an exponentially receding horizon.
And so most objects that come into existence
have to be causally very similar to the things that exist
cause they're close by in that space
and they can actually get to it
by an almost shortest path for that object.
Yeah, the almost shortest path is the most likely
and like by a lot.
By a lot.
Okay, so if you see a high copy number.
Yeah, imagine yourself-
A copy number of greater than one.
Yeah, I mean, basically we live,
the more complex we get,
we live in a space that is growing exponentially large.
And the ways of getting to objects in the space
are also growing exponentially large.
And so we're this kind of recursively
like stacked structure of like all of these objects
that are clinging on to each other for existence.
And then they like grab something else
and are like able to bring that thing into existence
cause it's kind of similar to them.
But there is a face transition, there isn't-
There is a transition.
There is a place where you would say, oh, that's why-
I think it's actually abrupt.
I've never been able to say that
in my entire career before.
I've always gone back and forth
about whether the original life was kind of gradual or abrupt.
I think it's very abrupt.
Well, poetically, chemically, literally, what, snaps?
Okay, that's very beautiful.
It snaps, we'll be poetic today.
But no, I think there's like a lot of random exploration
and then there's like, and then the structure,
the possibility space just collapses on the structure
kind of really fast that can reinforce its own existence
because it's basically fighting against non-existence.
Yeah, you tweeted the most significant struggle
for existence in the evolutionary process
is not among the objects that do exist
but between the ones that do
and those that never have the chance to.
This is where selection does most of its causal work.
The objects that never get a chance to exist,
the struggle between the ones
that never get a chance to exist and the ones that-
Okay, what's that line exactly?
I don't know, we can make songs out of all of these.
What are the objects that never get a chance to exist?
What does that mean?
So there was this website, I forgot what it was,
but it's like a neural network
that just generates a human face.
And it's like, this person does not exist.
I think that's what it's called, right?
So you can just click on that all day
and you can look at people all day that don't exist.
All of those people exist in that space
of things that don't exist.
Yeah, but there's the real struggle.
Yeah, so the struggle of the quote,
the struggle for existence is,
that goes all the way back to Darwin's writing
about natural selection, right?
So like the whole idea of survival of the fittest
is everything struggling to exist,
is this predator-prey dynamic and the fittest survive.
And so the struggle for existence
is really what selection is all about.
But you're, and that's true.
We do see things that do exist,
competing to continue to exist.
But each time that,
like if you think about this space of possibilities
and each time the universe generates a new structure,
or like an object that exists,
generates a new structure along this causal chain,
it's generating something that exists
that never existed before.
And each time that we make that kind of decision,
we're excluding a huge space possibilities.
And so actually like as this process
of increasing assembly index,
it's not just that like the space
that these objects exist in is exponentially growing,
but there are objects in that space
that are exponentially receding away from us.
So they're becoming exponentially less
and less likely to ever exist.
And so existence excludes a huge number of things.
Just because of the accident of history,
how it ended up-
Yeah, it is in part an accident
because I think some of the structure
that gets generated is driven a bit by randomness.
I think a lot of it,
so one of the conceptions that we have in assembly
theory is the universe is random at its base.
You can see this in chemistry,
like unconstrained chemical reactions are pretty random.
And then, and also quantum mechanics,
there's lots of places that give evidence for that.
And deterministic structures emerge
by things that can causally reinforce themselves
and maintain persistence over time.
And so we are some of the most deterministic things
in the universe.
And so we can generate very regular structure
and we can generate new structure
along a particular lineage,
but the possibility space at the sort of tips,
like the things we can generate next is really huge.
So there's some stochasticity
in what we actually instantiate
as the next structures that get built in the biosphere.
It's not completely deterministic
because the space of future possibilities
is always larger than the space of things that exist now.
So how many instantiations of life is out there, do you think?
So how often does this happen?
What we see happen here on Earth,
how often is this process repeated
throughout our galaxy, throughout the universe?
So I said before, like right now,
I think the origin of life is a continuous process on Earth.
Like I think this idea of like combinatorial spaces
that are biosphere generates,
not just chemistry, but other spaces
often cross this threshold
where they then allow themselves to persist
with a particular regular structure over time.
So language is another one where,
like the space of possible configurations
of the 26 letters of the English alphabet
is astronomically large,
but we use with very high regularity certain structures.
And then we associate meaning to them
because of the regularity of like how much we use them.
So meaning is an emergent property of the causation
and the objects and like how often they recur
and what the relationship of the recurrences
to other objects.
Meaning is the emergent property, okay, got it.
Well, this is why you can play with language so much actually.
So words don't really carry meaning,
it's just about how you lace them together.
Yeah, but from where does the-
But you don't have a lot of room,
obviously as a speaker of a given language,
you don't have a lot of room with a given word to wiggle,
but you do have a certain amount of room
to push the meanings of words.
And I do this all the time and you have to do it
with the kind of work that I do
because if you want to discover an abstraction,
like some kind of concept that we don't understand yet,
it means we don't have the language.
And so the words that we have are inadequate
to describe the things,
this is why we're having a hard time
talking about assembly theory
because it's a newly emerging idea.
And so I'm constantly playing with words in different ways
to try to convey the meaning
that is actually behind the words, but it's hard to do.
So you have to wiggle within the constraints.
Yes, lots of wiggle.
The great orators are just good at wiggling.
Do you wiggle?
I'm not a very good wiggler, no.
This is the problem, this is part of the problem.
No, I like playing with words a lot.
It's very funny,
because I know you talked about this with Lee,
but people are so offended
by the writing of the paper that came out last fall.
And it was interesting because the ways that we use words
were not the way that people were interacting with the words.
And I think that was part of the mismatch
where we were trying to use words in a new way
because we were trying to describe something
that hadn't been described adequately before,
but we had to use the words that everyone else uses
for things that are related.
And so it was really interesting
to watch that clash play out in real time for me,
being someone that tries to be so precise with my word usage,
knowing that it's always going to be vague.
Boy, can I relate, like what is truth?
Is truth the thing you meant when you wrote the words,
or is truth the thing that people understood
when they read the words?
Oh, yeah.
I think that compression mechanism into language
is a really interesting one.
And that's why Twitter is a nice exercise.
I love Twitter.
You get to write a thing,
and you think a certain thing when you write it,
and then you get to see all these other people interpret it
in all kinds of different ways.
I use it as an experimental platform for that reason.
I wish there was a higher diversity
of interpretation mechanisms applied to tweets,
meaning like all kinds of different people would come to it.
Like some people that see the good in everything,
and some people that are ultrasonicals,
a bunch of haters, and a bunch of lovers,
and a bunch of-
Maybe they could do better jobs
with presenting material to people.
Like, you know, the rant, like how things,
you know, it's like usually based on interest,
but I think it would be really nice
if you got like 10% of your Twitter feed
was random stuff sampled from other places.
That'd be kind of fun.
Also would love to filter just like Ben,
the response to tweets by like
the people that hate on everything.
The people that are-
Oh, that would be fantastic.
The people that are like super positive about everything,
and then they'll just kind of,
I guess normalize their response.
Yeah.
Because then it'd be cool to see if the people
that are usually positive about everything
are hating on you,
or like totally don't understand,
or completely misunderstood.
Yeah, usually it takes a lot of clicking to find that out.
Yeah.
Yeah, so it'd be better if it was sorted, yeah.
The more clicking you do,
the more damaging it is to the soul.
It's like instead of like,
well, you could have the blue check,
but you should have like,
are you a pessimist, an optimist?
Yeah, there's a lot of colors.
The chaotic neutral.
What's your-
Yeah, a whole rainbow of checks.
And then you realize there's more categories
than we can possibly express in colors.
Yeah, of course.
People are complex.
That's our best feature.
I don't know how we got to the wiggling required
given the constraints of language,
because I think we started about me asking
about alien life,
which is how many different times
did the face transition happen elsewhere?
Do you think there's other alien civilizations out there?
This goes into like the,
are you on the boundary of insane or not?
But when you think about the structure
of the physics of what we are that deeply,
it really changes your conception of things.
And going to this idea of the universe,
being kind of small in physical space
compared to how big it is in time
and how large we are,
it really makes me question
about whether there's any other structure
that's like this giant crystal in time,
this giant causal structure,
like our biosphere slash technosphere
is anywhere else in the universe.
Why not?
I don't know.
Just because this one is gigantic,
doesn't mean there's no other gigantic structure.
But I think the universe is expanding, right?
It's expanding in space,
but in assembly theory, it's also expanding in time.
And actually that's driving the expansion in space.
And expansion in time is also driving the expansion
in the sort of combinatorial space of things on our planet.
So that's driving the sort of pace of technology
and all the other things.
So time is driving all of these things,
which is a little bit crazy to think
that the universe is just getting bigger
because time is getting bigger.
But like the sort of visual that gets built in my brain
about that is like the structure that we're building
on this planet is packing more and more time
in this very small volume of space, right?
Because our planet hasn't changed its physical size
in four billion years,
but there's like a ton of causation and recursion and time,
whatever word you wanna use,
information packed into this.
And I think this is also embedded
in sort of the virtualization of our technologies
or the abstraction of language and all of these things.
These things that seem really abstract
are just really deep in time.
And so what that looks like is you have a planet
that becomes increasingly virtualized.
And so it's getting bigger and bigger in time,
but not really expanding out in space.
And the rest of space is like kind of moving away from it.
Again, it's a sort of exponentially receding horizon.
And I'm just not sure how far
into this evolutionary process something gets
if it can ever see
that there's another such structure out there.
What do you mean by virtualized in that context?
Virtual as sort of a play on virtual reality
and like simulation theories,
but virtual also in a sense of,
we talk about virtual particles in particle physics,
which they are very critical to doing calculations
about predicting the properties of real particles,
but we don't observe them directly.
So what I mean by virtual here
is virtual reality for me,
things that appear virtual, appear abstract
are just things that are very deep in time
in the structure of the things that we are.
So if you think about you as a 4 billion year old object,
the things that are part of you,
like your capacity to use language
or think abstractly or have mathematics
are just very deep temporal structures.
That's why they look like they're informational and abstract
is because they're like they're existing
in this temporal part of you,
but not necessarily spatial part.
Just because I have a 4 billion year old history,
why does that mean I can't hang out with aliens?
There's a couple ideas that are embedded here.
So one of them comes again from Paul.
He wrote this book years ago about
like the eerie silence and why we're alone.
And he concluded the book with this idea
of quintelligence or something,
but like this idea that like really advanced intelligence
would basically just build itself into a quantum computer
and it would want to operate in the vacuum of space
because that's the best place to do quantum computation.
And it would just like run out
all of its computations indefinitely,
but it would look completely dark
to the rest of the universe.
And I don't think as typical,
like I don't think that's actually like the right physics,
but I think something about that idea
as I do with all ideas is partially correct.
And Freeman Dyson also had this amazing paper
about how long life could persist
in a universe that was exponentially expanding
and his conception was like,
if you imagine analog life form,
it could run slower and slower and slower
and slower and slower as a function of time.
And so it would be able to run indefinitely
even against an exponentially expanding universe
because it would just run exponentially slower.
And so I guess part of what I'm doing in my brain
is putting those two things together
along with this idea that we are building,
like if you imagine with our technology,
we're now building virtual realities, right?
Like things we actually call virtual reality,
which required four billions of years of history
and a whole bunch of data to basically embed them
in a computer architecture.
So now you can put like an Oculus headset on
and think that you're in this world, right?
And what you really are embedded in
is in a very deep temporal structure.
And so it's huge in time, but it's very small in space
and you can go lots of places in the virtual space, right?
But you're still stuck in like your physical body
and like sitting in the chair.
And so, you know, part of it is it might be the case
that sufficiently evolved biospheres
kind of virtualize themselves
and they internalize their universe
in their sort of temporal causal structure
and they close themselves off
from the rest of the universe.
I just don't know if a deep temporal structure
necessarily means that you're closed off.
No, I don't either.
So that's kind of my fear.
So I'm not sure I'm agreeing with what I say.
I'm just saying like, this is one sort of conclusion.
And you know, like in my most sort of like,
it's interesting because I don't do psychedelic drugs,
but when people describe to me
like you're sitting with the faces and stuff
and like I have had a lot of deep conversations
with friends that have done psychedelic drugs
for intellectual reasons and otherwise,
but I'm always like, oh, it sounds like
you're just doing theoretical physics.
Like that's what brains do on theoretical physics.
So I live in these like really abstract spaces most of the time,
but there's also this issue of extinction, right?
Like extinction events are basically pinching off
an entire like causal structure.
The one of these like,
I'm gonna call them time crystals.
I don't like know what,
but there's like these very large objects in time
pinching off that whole structure from the rest of it.
And so it's like, if you imagine that sort of same thing
in the universe, I, you know,
I once thought that sufficiently advanced technologies
would look like black holes.
That would be just completely imperceptible to us.
So, so there might be lots of aliens out there.
Maybe that's the explanation for all the singularities.
They're all pinched off causal structures
that virtualize their reality and kind of broke off from us.
Black holes in every way.
So like untouchable to us
or unlikely be detectable by us
with whatever sensory mechanisms we have.
But the other way I think about it is,
is there is probably hopefully life out there.
So like I do work on life detection efforts
in the solar system,
and I'm trying to help with the habitable worlds
observatory mission planning right now
and working with like the biosignatures team for that,
like to think about exoplanet biosignatures.
So like I have some optimism that we might find things,
but they're the challenges that we don't know
the likelihood for life,
like, which is what you were talking about.
So if I get to a more grounded discussion,
what I'm really interested in doing
is trying to solve the origin of life
so we can understand how likely life is out there.
So I don't think that the,
I think that the problem of discovering alien life
and solving the origin of life are deeply coupled
and in fact are one in the same problem.
And that the first contact with alien life
will actually be in an origin life experiment,
but that part I'm super interested in.
And then there's this other feature
that I think about a lot,
which is our own technological phase of development
as sort of like,
what is this phase in the evolution of life on a planet?
If you think about a biosphere emerging on a planet
and evolving over billions of years
and evolving into a technosphere.
When a technosphere can move off planet
and basically reproduce itself on another planet,
now you have biospheres reproducing themselves.
Basically they have to go through technology to do that.
And so there are ways of thinking about
sort of the nature of intelligent life
and how it spreads in that capacity
that I'm also really excited about and thinking about.
And all of those things for me are connected.
Like we have to solve the origin of life
in order for us to get off planet
because we basically have to start life on another planet.
And we also have to solve the origin of life
in order to recognize other alien intelligence.
Like all of these things are like literally the same problem.
Right, understanding the origin of life here on earth
is a way to understand ourselves and to,
understanding ourselves as a prerequisite for me
and able to detect other intelligent civilizations.
I for one, take it for what it's worth, Anaya Waska.
One of the things I did is zoom out,
like aggressively at like a spaceship.
And it would always go quickly through the galaxy
and from the galaxy to this representation of the universe.
And at least for me, from that perspective,
it seemed like it was full of alien life.
Not just alien life, but intelligent life.
I like that.
And conscious life.
So like, I don't know how to convert it into words.
It's more like a feeling, like you were saying.
A feeling converted to a visual to words.
So I had a visual with it, but really it was a feeling
that it was just full of this vibrant energy.
That I was feeling when I'm looking at the people
in my life and full of gratitude.
But that same exact thing is everywhere in the universe.
Right.
So.
I totally agree with this.
Like that visual, I really love.
And I think we live in a universe
that like generates life and purpose.
And like, it's part of the structure of just the world.
And so maybe like this sort of lonely view I have is,
I never thought about it this way
till you're describing that.
I was like, I want to live in that universe.
And I'm like a very optimistic person.
And I love building visions of reality that are positive.
But I think for me right now in the intellectual process,
I have to tunnel through this particular way
of thinking about the loneliness
of being like separated in time from everything else.
Which I think like we also all are
because time is what defines us as individuals.
So part of you is drawn to the trauma of being alone.
Yeah.
In a physics, in a physics space.
Part of what I mean is like you have to go through ideas
you don't necessarily agree with to work out
what you're trying to understand.
And I'm trying to be inside this structure
so I can really understand it.
And I don't think I've been able to like,
like I'm so deeply embedded in what we are intellectually
right now that I don't have an ability to see these others,
these other ones that you're describing if they're there.
Well, one of the things you kind of described
that you already spoke to,
you call it the great perceptual filter.
Yeah.
So there's the famous great filter,
which is basically the idea that there's some really
powerful moment in every intelligent civilization
where they destroy themselves.
That explains why we have not seen aliens.
And you're saying that there's something like that
in the temporal history of the creation of complex objects
that at a certain point, they become an island,
an island too far to reach based on the perceptions.
I hope not, but yeah, I worry about it, yeah.
But that's basically meaning
there's something fundamental about the universe
where if the more complex you become,
the harder it will be to perceive other complex.
Yeah.
I mean, just think about us with microbial life, right?
Like we used to once be cells
and for most of human history,
we didn't even recognize cellular life was there
until we built a new technology,
microscopes that allowed us to see them.
Right?
So that's kind of, it's kind of weird, right?
Like things that they're close to us.
They're close, they're everywhere.
But also in the history of the development
of complex objects, they're pretty close.
Yes, super close, super close.
Like, yeah, I mean, everything on this planet is like,
it's like pretty much the same thing.
Like the space of possibilities is so huge.
It's like we're virtually identical.
So how many flavors or kinds of life
do you think are possible?
I'm kind of like trying to imagine
all the little flickering lights in the universe,
like in the way that you were describing,
that was kind of cool.
I mean, it was obvious to me.
It was exactly that, it was like lights.
Yeah.
The way you maybe see a city,
but a city from like up above,
you see a city with the flickering lights,
but there's a coldness to the city.
There's some, you know that humans are capable
of good and evil and you could see like
there's a complex feeling to the city.
I had no such complex feeling
about seeing the lights of all the galaxies,
whatever, the billions of galaxies.
Yeah, this is kind of cool.
I'll answer the question in a second,
but it's just maybe like this idea of flickering lights
and intelligence is interesting to me because I,
you know, like we have such a human centric view
of alien intelligences that a lot of the work
that I've been doing with my lab
is just trying to take inspiration
from non-human life on earth.
And so I have this really talented undergrad student
that's basically building a model
of alien communication based on fireflies.
So one of my colleagues or at Peleg is,
she's totally brilliant,
but she goes out with like GoPro cameras
and like, you know, films and high resolution,
all these firefly flickering.
And she has like this theory
about how their signaling evolved
to like maximally differentiate the flickering patterns.
So like she has a theory basically that predicts,
you know, like the species should flash like this.
If this one's flashing like this,
this other one's gonna do it at a slower rate
so that the, you know, like they can distinguish each other
living in the same environment.
And so this undergrad's building this model
where you have like a pulsar background
of all these like giant flashing sources in the universe
and an alien intelligence, you know,
wants to signal it's there.
So it's flashing like a firefly.
And I just like, I like the idea of thinking about
non-human aliens.
So that was really fun.
The mechanism of the flashing, unfortunately,
is like the diversity of that is very high
and we might not be able to see it.
That's what-
Yeah, well, I think there's some ways
we might be able to differentiate that signal.
I'm still thinking about this part of it.
So one is like, like if you have pulsars
and they all have a certain spectrum
to their pulsing patterns
and you have this one signal that's in there
that's basically tried to maximally differentiate itself
from all the other sources in the universe,
it might stick out in the distribution.
Like there might be ways of actually being able to tell
if it's an anomalous pulsar basically.
But I don't know if that would really work or not.
So still thinking about it.
You tweeted, if one wants to understand
how truly combinatorially and compositionally complex
our universe is,
they only need step into the world of fashion.
It's bonkers how big the constructable space
of human aesthetics is.
Can you explain?
Can you explore the space of human aesthetics?
Yeah, I don't know.
I've been kind of assessed with a,
I never know how to pronounce it, a chaparelli.
Like, you know, like they have ears and things.
Like it's such like a weird grotesque aesthetic,
but like it's totally bizarre.
But what I meant, like I have a visceral experience
when I walk into my closet.
I have like a lot of...
How big is your closet?
It's pretty big.
It's like I do assembly theory every morning
when I walk in my closet,
because I really like a very large combinatorial
diverse palette,
but I never know what I'm gonna build in the morning.
Do you get rid of stuff?
Sometimes.
Or do you have trouble getting rid of stuff?
I have trouble getting rid of some stuff.
It depends on what it is.
If it's vintage, it's hard to get rid of
because it's kind of hard to replace.
It depends on the piece, yeah.
So you have, your closet is that one of those
temporal time crystals that you get to visualize
the entire history of the-
It's a physical manifestation of my personality.
So why is that a good visualization
of the combinatorial and compositioning complex?
I think it's an interesting feature of our species
that we get to express ourselves through what we wear.
Like if you think about all those animals
in the jungle you saw,
they're born looking the way they look
and then they're stuck with it for life.
That's true.
I mean, it is one of the loudest, clearest,
most consistent ways we signal to each other
is the clothing we wear.
Yeah.
And it's highly dynamic.
I mean, you can be dynamic if you want to.
Very few people are...
There's a certain bravery,
but it's actually more about confidence.
Willing to play with style and play with aesthetics.
And I think it's interesting
when you start experimenting with it,
how it changes the fluidity of the social spaces
and the way that you interact with them.
But there's also commitment.
You have to wear the outfit all-
I know, I know, it's a big commitment.
Do you feel like that every morning?
I wear, that's why-
You're like, this is a life commitment.
So all I have is suits and black shirt and jeans.
Those are the two outfits.
Well, see, this is the thing though, right?
It simplifies your thought process in the morning.
So like, I have other ways I do that.
I park in the same exact parking spot
when I go to work on the fourth floor of a parking garage
because no one ever parks on the fourth floor.
So I don't have to remember where I park my car.
But I really like aesthetics and playing with them.
So I'm willing to spend part of my cognitive energy
every morning trying to figure out
what I want to be that day.
Did you deliberately think about the outfit
you're wearing today?
Yep.
Was there backup options?
Were you going back and forth between some?
Three or four.
But I really like-
Were they drastically different?
Yes.
So, okay.
And even this one could have been really different
because it's not just the sort of jacket and the shoes
and the hairstyle, it's like the jewelry and the accessories.
So like any outfit is a lot of small decisions.
Well, I think your current outfit is like
a lot of shades of yellow.
There's like a theme.
Yeah.
It's nice.
It's really, I'm grateful that you did that.
Thanks.
It's like it's its own art form.
Yeah.
Yellow's my daughter's favorite color.
And I never really thought about yellow much,
but she's been obsessed with yellow.
She's seven now and I don't know.
I just really love it.
I guess you can pick a color and just make that the constraint.
Yeah.
And just go with the understanding of the beauty.
I'm playing with yellow a lot lately.
Like this is not even the most yellow
because I have black pants on, but I have-
You call, yeah.
I've worn outfits that have probably five shades
of yellow in them.
Wow.
What do you think beauty is?
We seem to, so underlying this idea of playing
with aesthetics is we find certain things beautiful.
Yeah.
What is it that humans find beautiful?
And why do we need to find things beautiful?
Yeah.
It's interesting.
It's not, I mean, I am attracted to style and aesthetics
because I think they're beautiful,
but it's much more because I think it's fun to play with.
And so I will get to the beauty thing,
but I guess I wanna just explain a little bit
about my motivation in this space
because it's really an intellectual thing for me.
And Stewart Brand has this great infographic
about the layers of human society.
And I think it starts with the natural sciences
and physics at the bottom,
and it goes through all these layers and it's economics.
And then fashion is at the top,
is the fastest moving part of human culture.
And I think I really like that because it's so dynamic
and so short and it's temporal longevity
contrasted with studying the laws of physics,
which are the deep structure reality
that I feel like bridging those scales
tells me much more about the structure
of the world that I live in.
That said, there's some kinds of fashions.
Like a dude in a black suit with a black tie,
it seems to be less dynamic.
Yeah.
It seems to persist through time.
Are you embodying this?
Yeah, I think so.
I think it just-
I'd like to see you wearing yellow wax.
I wouldn't even know what to do with myself.
I would freak out.
I wouldn't know how to act in the world.
You wouldn't know how to be you, yeah.
I know this is amazing though, isn't it?
Amazing, like you have the choice to do it.
But one of my favorite, just on the question of beauty,
one of my favorite fashion designers of all time
is Alexander McQueen.
And he was really phenomenal, but like his early,
and actually I kind of used like what happened to him
in the fashion industry as a coping mechanism
with our paper when, like the nature paper in the fall
when everyone was saying it was controversial
and how terrible that like,
but controversial is good, right?
But when Alexander McQueen first came out
with his fashion lines, he was mixing horror and beauty.
And people were horrified.
It was so controversial, like it was Macabre.
He had like, it looked like there were blood on the models
and like-
That's beautiful, just look into the picture.
Yeah, no, I mean, his stuff is amazing.
His first like runway line, I think was called neolism.
I don't know if you could find it.
You know, I mean, he was really dramatic.
He carried a lot of trauma with him.
There you go, that's, yeah, yeah.
Wow.
But he changed the fashion industry.
His stuff became very popular.
That's a good offer to show up to a party.
Right, right.
But this gets at the question like,
is that horrific or is it beautiful?
And I think, you know, he had a tremendous,
he ended up committing suicide
and actually he left his death note on the descent of man.
So he was a really deep person.
So I mean, great fashion certainly has that kind of depth to it.
Yeah, it sure does.
So I think it's the intellectual pursuit, right?
Like it's not, so this is like very highly intellectual.
And I think it's a lot like how I play with language.
It's the same way that I play with fashion
or the same way that I play with ideas
and theoretical physics.
Like there's always this space
that you can just push things just enough.
So they're like, they look like something
someone thinks is familiar, but they're not familiar.
And yeah, and I think that's really cool.
It seems like beauty doesn't have much function, right?
But it seems to also have a lot of influence
on the way we collaborate.
It has tons of function.
What do you mean it doesn't have function?
I guess sexual selection incorporates beauty somehow,
but why?
Because beauty is a sign of health or something.
I don't even...
Oh, evolutionarily, maybe,
but then beauty becomes a signal of other things, right?
So it's really not like,
and then beauty becomes an adaptive trait.
So it can change with different species.
Like, you know, maybe some species would think,
well, you thought the frog having babies come out
of its back was beautiful and I thought it was grotesque.
Like there's not a universal definition of what's beautiful.
It is something that is dependent on your history
and how you interact with the world.
And I guess what I like about beauty,
like any other concept, is when you turn it on its head.
So, you know, maybe the traditional conception of,
you know, why women wear makeup
and they dress certain ways
is because they wanna look beautiful
and pleasing to people.
And I just like to do it
because it's a confidence thing.
It's about embodying the person that I want to be
and about owning that person.
And then the way that people interact with that person
is very different than if I didn't have the,
like if I wasn't using that attribute as part of,
and obviously that's influenced by the society I live
and like what's aesthetically pleasing things,
but it's interesting to be able to turn that around
and not have it necessarily be about the aesthetics,
but about the power dynamics that the aesthetics create.
But you're saying there's some function to beauty
in that way, in the way you're describing
and the dynamic it creates in the social interaction.
Well, the point is you're saying it's an adaptive trait
for like sexual selection or something.
And I'm saying that the adaptation that beauty confers
is far richer than that.
And some of the adaptation is about social hierarchy
and social mobility and just plain social dynamics.
Like why do some people dress goth?
It's because they identify with a community
and a culture associated with that
and they get, you know, and that's a beautiful aesthetic.
It's a different aesthetic, some people don't like it.
So it has the same richness as does language.
Yes.
It's the same kind of.
Yes, and I think too few people think about
the way that the aesthetics they build for themselves
in the morning and how they carry it in the world
and the way that other people interact with that
because they put clothes on and they don't think
about clothes as caring function.
Let's jump from beauty to language.
There's so many ways to explore the topic of language.
You called it, you said that language is parts of language
or language in itself and the mechanism of language
is a kind of living life form.
You've tweeted a lot about this in all kinds of poetic ways.
Let's talk about the computation aspect of it.
You tweeted, the world is not a computation
but computation is our best current language
for understanding the world.
It is important we recognize this so we can start to see
the structure of our future languages that will allow us
to see deeper than the computation allows us.
So what's the use of language in helping us understand
and make sense of the world?
I think one thing that I feel like I notice
much more viscerally than I feel like I hear
other people describe is that the representations
in our mind and the way that we use language
are not the things like, actually I mean,
this is an important point going back to what Gertl did
but also this idea of signs and symbols
and all kinds of ways of separating them.
There's like the word, right?
And then there's like what the word means about the world.
And we often confuse those things.
And what I feel very viscerally, I almost sometimes think
I have some kind of like synesthesia for language
or something and I just like don't interact with it
like the way that other people do.
But for me, words are objects
and the objects are not the things that they describe.
They have like a different ontology to them.
Like they're physical things and they carry causation
and they can create meaning, but they're not,
they're not what we think they are.
And also like the internal representations in our mind,
like the things I'm seeing about this room
are probably like they're small projection
of the things that are actually in this room.
And I think we have such a difficult time moving past
the way that we build representations in the mind
and the way that we structure our language
to realize that those are approximations
to what's out there and they're fluid
and we can play around with them
and we can see deeper structure underneath them
that I think like we're missing a lot.
Yeah, but also the life of the mind is in some ways
richer than the physical reality.
What's going on in your mind might be a projection
actually here, but there's also all kinds
of other stuff going on there.
Yeah, for sure.
I love this essay by Poincare
about like mathematical creativity
where he talks about this sort of like frothing
of all these things and then like somehow you build theorems
on top of it and they become kind of concrete.
But like, and I also think about this with language.
It's like there's a lot of stuff happening in your mind
but you have to compress it in this few sets of words
to try to convey it to someone.
So it's a compactification of the space
and it's not a very efficient one.
And I think just recognizing that there's a lot
that's happening behind language is really important.
I think this is one of the great things
about the existential trauma of large language models
I think is the recognition that language
is not the only thing required.
Like there's something underneath it, not by everybody.
Can you just speak to the feeling you have
when you think about words?
So is there, like what's the magic of words to use it?
Like do you feel, it almost sometimes feels
like you're playing with it.
Yeah, I was just gonna say it's like a playground.
But you're almost like, I think one of the things
you enjoy, maybe I'm projecting, is deviating,
like using words in ways that not everyone uses them.
Slightly sort of deviating from the norm a little bit.
I love doing that in everything I do,
but especially with language.
But not so far that it doesn't make sense.
So you're always like tethered to reality, to the norm,
but like are playing with it.
Like basically fucking with people's minds a little bit.
I mean, like, you know, and in so doing,
creating a different perspective on the thing
that's been previously explored in a different way.
Yeah, it's literally my favorite thing to do.
Yeah, use words as one way to make people think.
Yeah, so I, you know, a lot of my sort of,
like what happens in my mind when I'm thinking about ideas
is I've been presented with this information
about how people think about things.
And I try to go around to different communities
and hear the ways that different,
whether it's like, you know, hanging out
with a bunch of artists or philosophers or scientists
thinking about things.
Like they all think about it different ways.
And then I just try to figure out like,
how do you take the structure of the way
that we're talking about it and turn it slightly?
So you have all the same pieces
that everybody sees are there,
but the description that you've come up with
seems totally different.
So they can understand that there's,
like they understand the pattern you're describing,
but they never heard the structure underlying it
described the way that you describe it.
Is there words or terms you remember
that disturbed people the most,
maybe the positive sense of disturbed?
Is assembly theory, I suppose, is one?
Yeah, I mean, the first couple sentences
of that paper disturbed people a lot.
And I think they were really carefully constructed
in exactly this kind of way.
What was that?
Let me look it up.
Oh, it was really fun.
But I think it's interesting,
because I do, you know, sometimes I'm very upfront about it.
I say I'm gonna use the same word
in probably six different ways in a lecture, and I will.
You're right.
Scientists have grappled with reconciling
biological evolution with immutable laws
of the universe defined by physics.
These laws underpin life's origin, evolution, and the-
I can't wait for this with me when he was here too.
The development of human culture.
Well, he was, I think your love for words
runs deeper than Lee's.
Yeah, for sure.
I mean, this is part of the sort of brilliant thing
about our collaboration is, you know, complimentary skill set.
So I love playing with the abstract space of language,
and it's a really interesting playground
when I'm working with Lee,
because he thinks that a much deeper level of abstraction
than can be expressed by language,
and the ideas we work on are hard to talk about
for that reason.
What do you think about computation as a language?
I think it's a very poor language.
A lot of people think it's a really great one,
but I think it has some nice properties.
But I think the feature of it that, you know,
is compelling is this kind of idea of universality,
that like you can, if you have a language,
you can describe things in any other language.
Well, for me, one of the people who kind of revealed
the expressive power of computation,
aside from Alan Turing, is Stephen Wolfram,
through all the explorations of like cellular automata
type of objects that he did in a new kind of science
and afterwards.
So what would he get from that?
The kind of computational worlds that are revealed
through even something as simple as cellular automata.
It seems like that's a really nice way to explore languages
that are far outside our human languages
and do so rigorously and understand how those kinds
of complex systems interact with each other,
can emerge, all that kind of stuff.
I don't think that they're outside our human languages.
I think they define the boundary
of the space of human languages.
They allow us to explore things within that space,
which is also fantastic, but I think there is a set
of ideas that takes, and Stephen Wolfram has worked
on this quite a lot and contributed very significantly
to it, and I really like some of the stuff
that Stephen's doing with like his physics project,
but don't agree with a lot of the foundations of it,
but I think the space is really fun that he's exploring.
There's this assumption that computation is
at the base of reality, and I kind of see it
at the top of reality, not at the base,
because I think computation was built by our biosphere.
It's something that happened after many billion years
of evolution, and it doesn't happen in every physical object.
It only happens in some of them, and I think one
of the reasons that we feel like the universe
is computational is because it's so easy for us
as things that have the theory of computation in our minds,
and actually in some sense, it might be related
to the functioning of our minds and how we build languages
to describe the world and sets of relations
to describe the world, but it's easy for us
to go out into the world and build computers,
and then we mistake our ability to do that
with assuming that the world is computational,
and I'll give you a really simple example.
This one came from John Conway.
I one time had a conversation with him,
which was really delightful.
He was really fun, but he was pointing out
that if you string lights in a barn,
you can program them to have your favorite
one-dimensional CA, and you might even be able
to make them be capable of universal computation.
Is universal computation a feature of the string lights?
Well, no.
No, it's probably not.
It's a feature of the fact that you as a programmer
had a theory that you could embed
in the physical architecture of the string lights.
Now, what happens, though, is we get confused
by this kind of distinction between us as agents
in the world that actually can transfer things
that life does onto other physical substrates
with what the world is, and so, for example,
you'll see people studying the mathematics
of chemical reaction networks and saying,
well, chemistry is Turing universal,
or studying the laws of physics and saying
the laws of physics are Turing universal,
but any time that you want to do that,
you always have to prepare an initial state.
You have to constrain the rule space,
and then you have to actually be able
to demonstrate the properties of computation,
and all of that requires an agent or a designer
to be able to do that.
But it gives you an intuition.
If you look at a 1D or 2D cellular automata,
it gives you, it allows you to build an intuition
of how you can have complexity emerge
from very simple beginnings,
very simple initial conditions.
I think that's the intuition
that people have derived from it.
The intuition I get from cellular automata
is that the flat space of an initial condition
in a fixed dynamical law is not rich enough
to describe an open-ended generation process,
and so the way I see cellular automata
is they're embedded slices
in a much larger causal structure,
and if you want to look at a deterministic slice
of that causal structure,
you might be able to extract a set of consistent rules
that you might call a cellular automata,
but you can embed them in this much larger space.
That's not dynamical,
and is about the causal structure and relations
between all of those computations,
and that would be the space cellular automata live in,
and I think that's the space that Stephen is talking about
when he talks about his Rouliad
and these hypergraphs of all these possible computations,
but I wouldn't take that as my base reality
because I think, again, computation itself,
this abstract property computation,
is not at the base of reality.
Can we just linger on that Rouliad?
A one Rouliad to rule them all.
Yeah, so this is part of Wolfram Physics Project.
It's what he calls the entangled limit
of everything that is computationally possible.
So what's your problem with the Rouliad?
Well, it's interesting.
So Stephen came to a workshop we had in the Beyond Center
in the fall, and the workshop theme was mathematics.
Is it evolved or eternal?
And he gave a talk about the Rouliad,
and he was talking about how,
a lot of the things that we talk about in the Beyond Center,
does reality have a bottom?
If it has a bottom, what is it?
I need to go to the-
Oh, this is great.
Does reality have a bottom?
Yeah, so we had one that was,
it was called Infinite Turtles or Ground Truth,
and it was really just about this issue.
But the thing that was interesting,
I think Stephen was trying to make the argument
that fundamental particles aren't fundamental,
gravitation is not fundamental,
these are just turtles,
and computation is fundamental.
And I just, I remember pointing out to him,
I was like, well, computation is your turtle.
And I think it's a weird turtle to have.
First of all, isn't it okay to have a turtle?
It's totally fine to have a turtle.
Everyone has a turtle.
You can't build a theory without a turtle.
It's just, so it depends on the problem you wanna describe.
And I actually, the reason I can't get behind
Stephen's ontology is I don't know what question
he's trying to answer.
And without a question to answer,
I don't understand why you're building a theory of reality.
And the question you're trying to answer is what life is.
What life is, which another simpler way of phrasing this,
how did life originate?
Well, I started working on the origin of life.
And I think what my challenge was there
was no one knew what life was.
And so you can't really talk about the origination
of something if you don't know what it is.
And so the way I would approach it is,
if you wanna understand what life is,
then proving that physics is solving the origin of life.
So there's the theory of what life is,
but there's the actual demonstration
that that theory is an accurate description
of the phenomena you aim to describe.
So again, they're the same problem.
It's not like I can decouple origin of life
from what life is, it's like that is the problem.
And the point I guess I'm making about having a question
is no matter what slice of reality you take,
what regularity of nature you're gonna try to describe,
there will be an abstraction that unifies
that structure of reality, hopefully.
And that will have a fundamental layer to it, right?
Because you have to explain something
in terms of something else.
But so if I wanna explain life, for example,
then my fundamental description of nature
has to be something I think that has to do
with time being fundamental.
But if I wanted to describe, I don't know,
the sort of interactions of matter and light,
I have elementary particles be fundamental.
If I wanna describe electricity and magnetism in the 1800s,
I have to have waves be fundamental, right?
So like you are in quantum mechanics,
like it's a wave function that's fundamental
because that's the sort of explanatory paradigm
of your theory.
So I guess I don't know what problem
saying computation is fundamental solves.
Doesn't he want to understand how does the basic
quantum mechanics and general relativity emerge?
Yeah, but that's- And how does time-
Right, so I think- Then that doesn't really answer
an important question for us?
Well, I think that the issue is general relativity
and quantum mechanics are expressed
in mathematical languages.
And then computation is a mathematical language.
So you're basically saying that maybe there's a more
universal mathematical language for describing theories
of physics that we already know.
That's an important question and I do think
that's what Steven's trying to do and do well.
But then the question becomes, does that formulation
of a more universal language for describing
the laws of physics that we know now tell us anything new
about the nature of reality?
Or is it a language?
And to you languages can't be fundamental.
The language itself is never the fundamental thing.
It's whatever it's describing.
So one of the possible titles you were thinking about
originally for the book is the hard problem of life.
Sort of reminiscent of the hard problem of consciousness.
So you're saying that assembly theory is supposed
to be answering the question about what is life.
So let's go to the other hard problems.
You also say that's the easiest of the hard problems
is the hard problem of life.
So what do you think is the nature of intelligence
and consciousness?
We think something like assembly theory
can help us understand that.
I think if assembly theory is an accurate depiction
of the physics of life, it should shed a lot of light
on those problems.
And in fact, I sometimes wonder if the problems
of consciousness and intelligence are at all different
than the problem of life generally.
And I'm of two minds of it, but I in general try to,
you know, like the process of my thinking
is trying to regularize everything into one theory.
So pretty much every direction I have is like,
oh, how do I fold that into?
And like, so I'm just building this giant abstraction
that's basically trying to take every piece of data
I've ever gotten in my brain into a theory of what life is.
And consciousness and intelligence are obviously
some of the most interesting things that life has manifest.
And so I think they're very telling about
some of the deeper features about the nature of life.
It does seem like they're all flavors of the same thing,
but it's interesting to wonder like at which stage
that's something that we would recognize as life
in a sort of canonical silly human way
and something that we would recognize as intelligence
at which stage does that emerge?
Like at which assembly index does that emerge
and at which assembly index is a consciousness,
something that you would canonically recognize
as consciousness.
Is this the use, like this use of flavors,
the same as you meant when you were talking about flavors
of alien intelligence, like alien life?
Yeah, sure, yeah.
I mean, it's same as the flavors of ice cream
and the flavors of fashion.
Yeah, like, but we were talking about in terms of colors
and like very nondescript,
but the way that you just talked about flavors now
was more in like the space of consciousness and intelligence.
It was kind of like much more specific.
It'd be nice if there was a formal way
of expressing.
Quantifying flavors.
Quantifying flavors.
Yeah.
It seems like I would order it
life, consciousness, intelligence probably
as like the order in which things emerge
and they're all just the same.
They're the same.
We're using the word life differently here.
I mean, life sort of when I'm talking about
what is a living versus non-living thing
at a bar with a person,
I'm already like four or five drinks in,
that kind of thing.
Just that.
Like, we're not being too philosophical.
Like, here's the thing that moves
and here's the thing that doesn't move.
And, but maybe consciousness precedes that.
It's a weird dance there where like,
is life precede consciousness
or consciousness precede life?
And I think that understanding of what life is
in the way you're doing will help us disentangle that.
Depending on what you want to explain,
as I was saying before,
you have to assume something's fundamental.
And so because people can't explain consciousness,
there's a temptation for some people
to want to take consciousness as fundamental
and assume everything else is derived out of that.
And then you get some people
that want to assume consciousness preceded life.
And I don't find either of those views
particularly illuminating.
I think, because I don't want to assume a feminology
before I explain a thing.
And so what I've tried really hard to do
is not assume that I think life is anything,
except hold on to sort of the patterns and structures
that seem to be the sort of consistent ways
that we talk about this thing
and then try to build a physics that describes that.
And I think that's a really different approach
than saying, you know,
consciousness is this thing, you know,
that we all feel and experience about things.
I would want to understand the regularities
associated with that and build a deeper structure
underneath that and build into it.
I wouldn't want to assume that thing
and that I understand that thing,
which is usually how I see people talk about it.
The difference between life and consciousness.
Yeah. Which comes first.
Yeah, so I think if you're thinking about
this sort of thinking about living things
as these giant causal structures
or these objects that are deep in time
or whatever language we end up using to describe it,
it seems to me that consciousness is about,
the fact that we have a conscious experience
is because we are these temporally extended objects.
So consciousness and the abstraction that we have
in our minds is actually a manifestation
of all the time that's rolled up in us.
And it's just because we're so huge
that we have this very large inner space
that we're experiencing that's not,
and it's also separated off from the rest of the world
because we're the separate thread in time.
And so our consciousness is not exactly shared
with anything else because nothing else occupies
the same part of time that we occupy.
But I can understand something about you
maybe being conscious because you and I
didn't separate that far in the past
in terms of our causal histories.
So in some sense, we can even share experiences
with each other through language
because of that sort of overlap in our structure.
Well, then if consciousness is merely temporal separateness,
then that comes before life.
It's not merely temporal separateness.
It's about the depth in that time.
So the reason that my conscious experience
is not the same as yours is because we're separated in time.
The fact that I have a conscious experience
is because I'm an object that's super deep in time.
So I'm huge in time.
And that means that there's a lot there
that I am basically in some sense a universe onto myself
because my structure is so large relative
to the amount of space that I occupy.
But it feels like that's possible
to do before you get anything like bacteria.
I think there's a horizon
and I don't know how to articulate this yet.
It's a little bit like the horizon at the origin of life
where the space inside a particular structure becomes so large
that it has some access to space that doesn't feel as physical.
It's almost like this idea of counterfactuals.
So I think the past history of your horizon
is just much larger than can be encompassed
in a small configuration of matter.
So you can pull this stuff into existence.
This property is maybe a continuous property,
but there's something really different
about human-level physical systems
and human-level ability to understand reality.
I really love David Deutsch's
conception of universal explainers
and that's related to the theory of universal computation.
And I think there's some transition that happens there.
But maybe to describe that a little bit better,
what I can also say is what intelligence is in this framework.
So you have these objects that are large in time.
They were selected to exist
by constraining the possible space of objects
to this particular, all of the matter is funneled
into this particular configuration of object over time.
And so these objects arise through selection,
but the more selection that you have embedded in you,
the more possible selection you have on your future.
And so selection and evolution
we usually think about in the past sense
where selection happened in the past,
but objects that are high density configurations of matter
that have a lot of selection in them
are also selecting agents in the universe.
So they actually embody the physics of selection
and they can select on possible futures.
And I guess what I'm saying with respect to consciousness
and the experience we have
is that there's something very deep about that structure
and the nature of how we exist in that structure
that has to do with how we're navigating that space
and how we generate that space
and how we continue to persist in that space.
Is there shortcuts we can take
to artificially engineering living organisms,
artificial life, artificial consciousness,
artificial intelligence?
So maybe just looking pragmatically
at the LLMs we have now,
do you think those can exhibit qualities of life,
qualities of consciousness, qualities of intelligence
and the way we think of intelligence?
I mean, I think they already do
but not in the way I hear popularly discussed.
So there are obviously signatures of intelligence
and a part of an ecosystem of intelligent systems
but I don't know that individually,
I would assign all the properties to them that people have.
It's a little like,
so we talked about the history of eyes before
and how eyes scaled up into technological forms
and language has also had a really interesting history
and got much more interesting
I think once we started writing it down
and then in inventing books and things.
But every time that we started storing language
in a new way,
we were kind of existentially traumatized by it.
So the idea of written language was traumatic
because it seemed like the dead were speaking to us
even though they were deceased and books were traumatic
because suddenly there were lots of copies
of this information available to everyone
and it was gonna somehow dilute it.
And large language models are kind of interesting
because they don't feel as static, they're very dynamic.
But if you think about language
in the way I was describing before
as language is this very large in time structure
and before it had been something that was distributed
over human brains as a dynamic structure
and occasionally we store components
of that very large dynamic structure in books
or in written language.
Now we can actually store the dynamics of that structure
in a physical artifact which is a large language model.
And so I think about it almost like the evolution
of genomes in some sense where there might've been
really primitive genes in the first living things
and they didn't store a lot of information
or they were really messy.
And then by the time you get to the eukaryotic cell,
you have this really dynamic genetic architecture
that's rewritable and has all of these different properties.
And I think large language models are kind of like
the genetic system for language in some sense
where it's allowing a sort of archiving
that's highly dynamic.
And I think it's very paradoxical to us
because obviously in human history,
we haven't been used to conversing
with anything that's not human.
But now we can converse basically with a crystallization
of human language in a computer.
That's a highly dynamic crystal
because it's a crystallization in time
of this massive abstract structure
that's evolved over human history
and is now put into a small device.
I think crystallization kind of implies
that a limit on its capabilities.
I think there's not, I mean it very purposefully
because a particular instantiation of a language model
trained on a particular dataset
becomes a crystal of the language at that time it was trained
but obviously we're iterating with the technology
and evolving it.
I guess the question is when you crystallize it,
when you compress it, when you archive it,
you're archiving some slice
of the collective intelligence of the human species.
That's right.
And the question is like, how powerful is that?
Right, it's a societal level technology, right?
We've actually put collective intelligence in a box.
Yeah, I mean, how much smarter
is the collective intelligence of humans
versus a single human?
And that's the question of AGI versus human level intelligence.
Superhuman level intelligence
versus human level intelligence.
Like how much smarter can this thing when done well,
when we solve a lot of the computation complexities,
maybe there's some data complexities
and how to really archive this thing,
crystallize this thing really well.
How powerful is this thing gonna be?
Like what's your story?
I actually, I don't like the sort of language
we use around that.
And I think the language really matters.
So I don't know how to talk about
how much smarter one human is than another, right?
Like usually we talk about abilities
or particular talent someone has.
And going back to David Dreyche's idea
of universal explainers,
adopting the view that we're the first kinds of structures
our biosphere has built
that can understand the rest of reality.
We have this universal comprehension capability.
He makes an argument that basically we're the first things
that actually are capable of understanding anything.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean an individual understands everything,
but like we have that capability.
And so there's not a difference between that
and what people talk about with AGI.
In some sense, AGI is a universal explainer.
But it might be that a computer is much more efficient
at doing prime factorization or something than a human is,
but it doesn't mean that it's necessarily smarter
or has a broader reach of the kind of things
that can understand than a human does.
And so I think we really have to think about
is it a level shift
or is it we're enhancing certain kinds of capabilities
humans have in the same way that we can't enhance eyesight
by making telescopes and microscopes?
Are we enhancing capabilities we have into technologies
and the entire global ecosystem is getting more intelligent?
Or is it really that we're building some super machine
in a box that's gonna be smart and kill everybody?
Like that sounds like a science,
like it's not even a science fiction narrative.
It's a bad science fiction narrative.
I just don't think it's actually accurate
to any of the technologies we're building
or the way that we should be describing them.
It's not even how we should be describing ourselves.
So the benevolent stories is a benevolent system
that's able to transform our economy, our way of life
by just 10Xing the GDP of-
Well, these are human questions, right?
I don't think they're necessarily questions
that we're gonna like outsource
to an artificial intelligence.
I think what is happening and will continue to happen
is there's a co-evolution
between humans and technology that's happening.
And we're coexisting in this ecosystem right now
and we're maintaining a lot of the balance.
And for the balance to shift to the technology
would require some very bad human actors,
which is a real risk, or some sort of,
I don't know, some sort of dynamic that favors,
like I just don't know how that plays out
without human agency actually trying
to put it in that direction.
It could also be how rapid the rate-
The rapid rate is scary.
So I think the things that are terrifying
are the ideas of deep fakes or all the kinds of issues
that become legal issues
about artificial intelligence technologies
and using them to control weapons
or using them for child pornography
or faking out that someone's loved one was kidnapped
or killed and there's all kinds of things
that are super scary in this landscape
and all kinds of new legislation needs to be built
and all kinds of guardrails on the technology
to make sure that people don't abuse it need to be built.
And that needs to happen.
And I think one function of sort of
the artificial intelligence doomsday sort of part
of our culture right now
is it's sort of our immune response to knowing that's coming
and we're overscaring ourselves
so we try to act more quickly, which is good.
But I just, it's about the words that we use
versus the actual things happening behind the words.
I think one thing that's good
is when people are talking about things different ways,
it makes us think about them.
And also when things are existentially threatening,
we wanna pay attention to those.
But the ways that they're existentially threatening
and the ways that we're experiencing existential trauma,
I don't think that we're really gonna understand
for another century or two, if ever.
And I certainly think they're not the way
that we're describing them now.
Well, creating existential trauma
is one of the things that makes life fun, I guess.
Yeah, it's just what we do to ourselves.
It gives us really exciting big problems to solve.
Yeah, for sure.
Do you think we will see these AI systems
become conscious or convince us that they're conscious?
And then maybe we'll have relationships with them,
romantic relationships?
Well, I think people are gonna have romantic relationships
with them and I also think that some people
would be convinced already that they're conscious.
But I think in order, what does it take to convince,
convince people that something is conscious?
I think that we actually have to have an idea
of what we're talking about,
that we have to have a theory that explains
when things are conscious or not, that's testable, right?
And we don't have one right now.
So I think until we have that,
it's always gonna be this sort of gray area
where some people think it hasn't
and some people think it doesn't
because we don't actually know what we're talking about
that we think it has.
So do you think it's possible to get out of the gray area
and really have a formal test for consciousness?
For sure.
And for life as you were.
For sure.
As we've been talking about for somebody there.
Consciousness is a tricky one.
It is a tricky one.
I mean, that's why it's called
the hard problem of consciousness because it's hard.
And it might even be outside of the purview of science,
which means that we can't understand it in a scientific way.
There might be other ways of coming to understand it,
but those may not be the ones that we necessarily want
for technological utility or for developing laws
with respect to because the laws are the things
that are gonna govern the technology.
Well, I think that's actually where the hard problem
of consciousness, a different hard problem of consciousness
is that I fear that humans will resist.
That's the last thing they will resist
is calling something else conscious.
Oh, that's interesting.
I think it depends on the culture though,
because I mean, some cultures already think
like everything's imbued with a life essence
or a kind of conscious.
I don't think those cultures have nuclear weapons.
No, they don't.
They're probably not building
the most advanced technologies.
The cultures that are primed for destroying the other,
constructing a very effective propaganda machines
of what the other is, the group to hate,
are the cultures that I worry would.
Yeah, I know.
Would be very resistant to label something,
to sort of acknowledge the consciousness laden
in a thing that was created by us humans.
And so what do you think the risks are there
that the conscious things will get angry with us
and fight back?
No, that we would torture and kill conscious beings.
Oh, yeah, I think we do that quite a lot.
Anyway, without, I mean, it goes back to your,
and I don't know how to feel about this,
but we talked already about the predator-prey thing
that in some sense, being alive requires eating
other things that are alive.
And even if you're a vegetarian or try to have,
you're still eating living things, yeah.
So maybe part of the story of Earth
will involve a predator-prey dynamic
between humans and human creations.
Yeah, but I don't like thinking about them
as like our technologies as a separate species,
because this again goes back to the sort of levels
of selection issue.
And if you think about humans individually alive,
you miss the fact that societies are also alive.
And so I think about it much more in the sense of,
an ecosystem's not the right word,
but we don't have the right words for these things of like,
and this is why I talk about the technosphere,
it's a system that is both human and technological.
It's not human or technological.
And so this is the part that I think,
we're really good for the like,
and this is driving in part a lot of the sort of attitude
of like, I'll kill you first with my nuclear weapons.
We're really good at identifying things as other.
We're not really good at understanding
when we're the same,
or when we're part of an integrated system
that's actually functioning together
in some kind of cohesive way.
So even if you look at like,
the division in American politics or something, for example,
it's important that there's multiple sides
that are arguing with each other,
because that's actually how you resolve society's issues.
It's not like a bad feature.
I think like some of the sort of extreme positions
and like the way people talk about it are maybe not ideal.
But that's how societies solve problems.
What it looks like for an individual is really different
than the societal level outcomes and the fact that like,
there is, I don't wanna call it cognition
or computation, I don't know what you call it,
but like there is a process playing out
in the dynamics of societies
that we are all individual actors in.
And like, we're not part of that,
you know, like it requires all of us acting individually,
but like this higher level structure
is playing out some things and like things
are getting solved for it to be able to maintain itself.
And that's the level that our technologies live at.
They don't live at our level.
They live at the societal level
and they're deeply integrated with the social organism,
if you wanna call it that.
And so I really get upset when people talk about the species
of artificial intelligence.
I'm like, you mean we live in an ecosystem
of all these kinds of intelligent things
and these animating technologies that were,
you know, in some sense, helping to come alive.
We are generating them,
but it's not like the biosphere eliminated
all of its past history when it invented a new species.
All of these things get scaffolded
and we're also augmenting ourselves
at the same time that we're building technologies.
I don't think we can anticipate
what that system's gonna look like.
So in some fundamental way,
you always wanna be thinking about
the planet as one organism.
The planet is one living thing.
What happens when it becomes multi-planetary?
Is it still just a-
Still the same causal chain.
Same causal chain.
It's like when the first cell split into two.
That's what I was talking about
when a planet reproduces itself,
the technosphere emerges enough understanding.
It's like this recursive,
like the entire history of life is just recursion, right?
So you have an origin of life event.
It evolves for 4 billion years, at least on our planet.
It evolves the technosphere.
The technologies themselves start to become
having this property we call life,
which is the phase we're undergoing now.
It solves the origin of itself
and then it figures out how that process all works,
understands how to make more life
and then can copy itself onto another planet
so the whole structure can reproduce itself.
And so the origin of life is happening again right now.
On this planet, in the technosphere,
with the way that our planet
is undergoing another transition,
just like at the origin of life
when geochemistry can transition to biology,
which is the global, for me,
it was a planetary scale transition.
It was a multi-scale thing
that happened from the scale of chemistry
all the way to planetary cycles.
It's happening now all the way from individual humans
to the internet, which is a global technology
and all the other things.
Like there's this multi-scale process
that's happening and transitioning us globally.
And it's a dramatic transition.
It's happening really fast and we're living in it.
You think this technosphere that we created,
this increasingly complex technosphere
will spread to other planets?
I hope so.
I think so.
Do you think we'll become a type two Kardashev civilization?
I don't really like the Kardashev scale.
And it goes back to,
I don't like a lot of the narratives about life
because they're very survival of the fittest,
energy consuming, this, that, and the other thing.
It's very like, I don't know, sort of old world,
like conqueror mentality.
What's the alternative to that exactly?
I mean, I think it does require life
to use new energy sources in order to expand the way it is.
So that part's accurate.
But I think this sort of process of life,
like being the mechanism
that the universe creatively expresses itself,
generates novelty, explores the space of the possible
is really the thing that's most deeply intrinsic to life.
And so these sort of energy consuming scales of technology,
I think is missing the sort of actual feature
that's most prominent about any alien life
that we might find, which is that it's literally our universe,
our reality, trying to creatively express itself
and trying to find out what can exist
and trying to make it exist.
See, but past a certain level of complexity,
unfortunately, maybe you can correct me,
but we're built, all complex life on earth
is built on a foundation of that predator-prey dynamic.
And so like, I don't know if we can escape that.
I don't know.
No, we can't, but this is why I'm okay
with having a finite lifetime.
And you know, one of the reasons I'm okay with that actually
goes back to this issue of the fact
that we're resource bound.
We live in a, you know, like we have a finite amount
of material, whatever way you wanted to find material.
I think like for me, you know, material is time,
material is information,
but we have a finite amount of material.
If time is a generating mechanism,
it's always gonna be finite because the universe is,
you know, like it's a resource that's getting generated,
but it has a size,
which means that all the things that could exist
don't exist, and in fact, most of them never will.
So death is a way to make room in the universe
for other things to exist
that wouldn't be able to exist otherwise.
So if the universe over its entire temporal history
wants to maximize the number of things,
wants as a hard word, maximize a hard word,
all these things are approximate,
but wants to maximize the number of things that can exist,
the best way to do it is to make recursively embedded
stacked objects like us that have a lot of structure
and a small volume of space,
and to have those things turn over rapidly
so you can create as many of them as possible.
So there for sure is a bunch of those kinds of things
throughout the universe.
Hopefully.
Hopefully our universe is teeming with life.
This is like early on in the conversation
you mentioned that we really don't understand much,
like there's mystery all around us.
Yes.
If you had to like bet money at it, like what percent?
So like say a million years from now,
the story of science and human understanding,
understanding that started on Earth is written,
like what chapter are we on?
Is this like 1%, 10%, 20%, 50%, 90%?
How much do we understand?
Like the big stuff, not like the details
of like big important questions and ideas.
I think we're in our 20s.
And 20% of the 20.
No, like age wise, let's say we're in our 20s,
but the lifespan is gonna keep getting longer.
You can't do that.
I can.
You know why I use that though?
I'll tell you why.
Why my brain went there is because anybody
that gets an education in physics has this sort of trope
about how all the great physicists did their best work
in their 20s and then you don't do any good work after that.
And I always thought it was kind of funny
because for me, physics is not complete.
It's not nearly complete, but most physicists think
that we understand most of the structure of reality.
And so I think I actually, I think I put this
in the book somewhere, but like this idea to me
that societies would discover everything while they're young
is very consistent with the way
we talk about physics right now.
But I don't think that's actually the way
that things are gonna go.
And you're finding that people
that are making major discoveries are getting older
in some sense than they were.
And our lifespan is also increasing.
So I think there is something about age
and your ability to learn
and how much of the world you can see
that's really important over a human lifespan,
but also over the lifespan of societies.
And so I don't know how big the frontier is.
I don't actually think it has a limit.
I don't believe in infinity as a physical thing,
but I think as a receding horizon,
I think because the universe is getting bigger,
you can never know all of it.
Well, I think it's about 1.7%.
1.7, where does that come from?
And it's a finite, I don't know, I just made it up.
That number had to come from somewhere.
I think seven is the thing that people usually pick.
Seven percent?
So I wanted to say one percent,
but I thought it'd be funnier to add a point,
so humor, inject a little humor in there.
So the seven is for the humor,
one is for how much mister I think there is,
99% mystery, 1% known.
In terms of like really big important questions.
It's like the list, say there's gonna be like 200 chapters,
like the stuff that's gonna remain true.
But you think the book has a finite size.
Yeah, yeah.
And I don't.
I mean, not that I believe in infinities,
but I think the size of the book is growing.
Well, the fact that the size of the book is growing
is one of the chapters in the book.
Oh, there you go.
Ooh, we're being recursive.
I think you have to, you can't have an ever growing book.
Yes, you can.
I mean, you just, I mean, I don't even, because then.
Well, you couldn't have been asking this
at the origin of life, right?
Because obviously like you wouldn't have existed
at the origin of life,
but like the question of intelligence
and artificial general,
like those questions did not exist then.
And so, and they in part existed
because the universe invented a space
for those questions to exist through evolution.
But like, I think that question will still stand
a thousand years from now.
It will, but there will be other questions
we can't anticipate now that we'll be asking.
Yeah, and maybe we'll develop the kinds of languages
that we'll be able to ask much better questions.
Right, or like the theory of like gravitation, for example,
like when we invented that theory,
like we only knew about the planets in our solar system,
right, and now, you know, many centuries later,
we know about all these planets around other stars
and black holes and other things
that we could never have anticipated.
So, and then we can ask questions about them.
You know, like we wouldn't have been asking
about singularities and like,
can they really be physical things
in the universe several hundred years ago?
That question couldn't exist.
Yeah, but it's not,
I still think those are chapters in the book.
Like I don't get a sense from that.
So do you think the universe has an end?
If you think it's a book with an end?
I think the number of words required
to describe how the universe works has an end, yes.
Meaning, like, I don't care if it's infinite or not.
Right.
As long as the explanation is simple and it exists.
Oh, I see.
And I think there is a finite explanation
for each aspect of it.
The consciousness, the life.
Yeah.
I mean, very probably there's like some,
the black hole thing is like, what's going on there?
Where's that going?
It's so fun, it's so weird.
And then, you know, why the big bang?
Like what?
Right.
It's probably there's just a huge number of universes
and it's like universes inside the universe.
I think universes inside universes is maybe possible.
I just think it's,
it, every time we assume this is all there is,
it turns out there's much more.
The universe is a huge place.
And we mostly talked about the past
and the richness of the past, but the future.
I mean, with many worlds,
interpretation of quantum mechanics, so.
Oh, I'm not a many worlds person.
You're not.
No.
Are you?
How many Lexus are there?
Depending on the day.
Do some of them wear yellow jackets?
At the moment we asked the question, there was one.
At the moment I'm answering it,
there's now in near infinity, apparently.
I mean, the future is bigger than the past, yes?
Yes.
Okay, well there you go.
In the past, according to you, it's already gigantic.
Yeah, but yeah, I mean,
that's consistent with many worlds, right?
Cause like there's this constant branching, so.
But it doesn't really have a directionality to it.
It's, I don't know, many worlds is weird.
So my interpretation of reality is like,
if you fold it up like all that bifurcation of many worlds,
and you just fold it into the structure that is you,
and you just said you are all of those many worlds,
and like that sort of, you know, like your history,
like converged on you, but like you're actually
an object exists that's like,
that, you know, was selected to exist,
and you're self consistent with the other structures.
So like the quantum mechanical reality
is not the one that you live in.
It's this very deterministic, classical world.
And you're carving a path through that space,
but I don't think that you're constantly branching
into new spaces.
I think you are that space.
Wait, so to you at the bottom, it's deterministic.
I thought you said the universe.
No, it's random at the bottom, right?
But like this randomness that we see
at the bottom of reality that is quantum mechanics,
I think like people have assumed that that is reality.
And what I'm saying is like all those things you see
in many worlds, all those versions of you,
just collect them up and bundle them up.
And like, they're all you.
And what has happened is, you know,
like elementary particles don't have,
they don't live in a deterministic universe.
The things that we study in quantum experiments,
they live in this fuzzy random space.
But as that structure collapsed
and started to build structures that were deterministic
and evolved into you,
you are a very deterministic macroscopic object.
And you can look down on that universe
that doesn't have time in it, that random structure.
And you can see that all of these possibilities
look possible, but they don't look,
they're not possible for you
because you're constrained by this giant,
like causal structural history.
So you can't live in all those universes.
You'd have to go all the way back
to the very beginning of the universe
and retrace everything again to be a different you.
So where's the source of the free will for the macro object?
It's the fact that you're a deterministic structure
living in a random background.
And also all of that selection bundled in you
allows you to select on possible futures.
So that's where your will comes from.
And there's just always a little bit of randomness
because the universe is getting bigger.
And this idea that the past and the present
is not large enough yet to contain the future,
the extra structure has to come from somewhere.
And some of that is because outside
of those giant causal structures that are things like us,
it's fucking random out there.
And it's scary.
And we're all hanging on to each other
because the only way to hang on to each other,
like the only way to exist is to like cling on
to all of these causal structures
that we happen to co-inhabitate existence with
and try to keep reinforcing each other's existence.
All the selection bundled in.
And us, but free will is totally consistent with that.
I don't know what I think about that.
That's complicated to imagine.
Just that little bit of randomness is enough.
Okay.
Well, it's also, it's not just the randomness.
There's two features.
One is randomness helps generate some novelty
and some flexibility.
But it's also that like,
because you're the structure that's deep in time,
you have this combinatorial history that's you.
And I think about time and assembly theory,
not as linear time, but as combinatorial time.
So if you have all of this structure
that you're built out of, you, in principle,
your future can be combinations of that structure.
You obviously need to persist yourself as a coherent you.
So you want to optimize for a common,
like a future in that combinatorial space
that still includes you most of the time for most of us.
And when you make those kinds of,
and then that gives you a space to operate in.
And that's your sort of horizon
where your free will can operate.
And your free will can't be instantaneous.
So for like example, like I'm sitting here
talking to you right now, I can't be in the UK
and I can't be in Arizona, but I could plan,
I could execute my free will over time
because free will is a temporal feature of life
to be there, you know, tomorrow or the next day
if I wanted to.
But what about like the instantaneous decisions you're making?
Like to, I don't know, to put your hand on the table.
That's-
I think those were already decided a while ago.
I don't think that,
I don't think free will is ever instantaneous.
But on a longer time horizon,
there's some kind of staring going on.
Who's doing the staring?
You are.
And you being this macro object that's encompasses.
Or you being Lex.
Whatever you want to call it.
There you are saying words to things once again.
I know.
Why does anything exist at all?
You've kind of taken that as a starting point.
Yeah.
It exists.
I think that's the hardest question.
Isn't it just hard questions stack on top of each other?
It is.
Wouldn't it be the same kind of question of what is life?
It is the same.
Well, that's the sort of like,
I try to fold all of the questions into that question
because I think that one's really hard.
And I think the nature of existence is really hard.
You think actually like answering what is life
will help us understand existence?
Maybe there's-
It's turtles all the way down.
It'll just-
Understanding the nature of turtles
will help us kind of march down.
Even if we don't have the experimental methodology
of reaching before the big bang.
Right.
So, well, I think there's sort of two questions
embedded here.
I think the one that we can't answer by answering life
is why certain things exist and others don't.
But I think the sort of ultimate question,
the sort of like prime mover question
of why anything exists, we will not be able to answer.
What's outside the universe?
Oh, there's nothing outside the universe.
So I have a very, I am a very,
like I am like the most physicalist
that like anyone could be.
So like for me, everything exists in our universe.
And like I like to like think it like everything exists here.
So even when we talk about the multiverse,
I don't like to me,
it's not like there's all these other universes
outside of our universe that exists.
The multiverse is a concept that exists in human minds here.
And it allows us to have some counterfactual reasoning
to reason about our own cosmology.
And therefore it's causal in our biosphere
to understanding the reality that we live in
and building better theories.
But I don't think that the multiverse is something like,
and also math, like I don't think there's a platonic world
that mathematical things live in.
I think mathematical things are here on this planet.
Like I don't think it makes sense to talk about things
that exist outside of the universe.
If you're talking about them,
you're already talking about something
that exists inside the universe
and is part of the universe
and is part of like what the universe is building.
It all originates here, it all exists here in some.
I mean, what else would there be?
There could be things you can't possibly understand
outside of all of this that we call the universe.
And you can say that,
and that's an interesting philosophy,
but again, this is sort of like pushing on the boundaries
of like the way that we understand things.
I think it's more constructive to say the fact
that I can talk about those things
is telling me something about the structure
of where I actually live and where I exist.
Just because it's more constructive doesn't mean it's true.
Well, it may not be true.
It may be something that allows me
to build better theories I can test
to try to understand something objective.
And in the end, that's a good way to get to the truth.
Exactly.
Even if you realize you were wrong in the past.
So there's no such thing as experimental platonism.
But if you think math is an object
that emerged in our biosphere,
you can start experimenting with that idea.
And that to me is really interesting.
I mean, mathematicians do think about math sometimes
as an experimental science,
but to think about math itself as an object
for study by physicists rather than a tool physicists use
to describe reality,
it becomes the part of reality they're trying to describe
to me as a deeply interesting inversion.
What do you use most beautiful
about this kind of exploration of the physics of life
that you've been doing?
I love the way it makes me feel.
And then you have to try to convert the feelings
into visuals and the visuals into words.
Yeah, so I think I love, yeah,
I love the way it makes me feel to have ideas
that I think are novel.
And I think that the dual side of that
is the painful process of trying to communicate
that with other human beings
to test if they have any kind of reality to them.
And I also love that process.
I love trying to figure out how to explain
really deep abstract things
that I don't think that we understand
and trying to understand them with other people.
And I also love the shock value of this kind of idea
we were talking about before of being on the boundary
of what we understand.
And so people can kind of see what you're seeing,
but they haven't ever saw it that way
before and I love the shock value that people have,
like that immediate moment of recognizing
that there's something beyond the way
that they thought about things before.
And being able to deliver that to people,
I think is one of the biggest joys that I have
is just like, maybe it's that sense of mystery,
like to share that there's something
beyond the frontier of how we understand
and we might be able to see it.
And you get to see the humans transformed.
Yeah.
Like no idea.
Yes.
And I think my greatest wish in life
is to somehow contribute to an idea
that transforms the way that we think.
Like, I have my problem, I wanna solve,
but like the thing that gives me joy about it
is really changing something
and ideally getting to a deeper understanding
of how the world works and what we are.
Yeah, I would say understanding life at a deep level
Yeah.
is probably one of the most exciting problems,
one of the most exciting questions.
So I'm glad you're trying to answer just that
and doing it in style.
It's the only way to do anything.
Thank you so much for this amazing conversation.
Thank you for being you, Sarah.
This was awesome.
Thanks, Lex.
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Sarah Walker.
To support this podcast,
please check out our sponsors in the description.
And now let me leave you with some words from Charles Darwin.
In the long history of humankind and animal kind too,
those who learned to collaborate
and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
Thank you for listening.
